Keith Ridgway
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Keith Ridgway (born 1965, Dublin, Republic of Ireland) is a novelist and short story writer.
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[edit] Writings
Ridgway's first major published work was the novella Horses, which appeared in Faber First Fictions Volume 13 in 1997. In 1998 his first full length novel, The Long Falling, was published by Faber & Faber, London. A short story collection, Standard Time, followed in 2000, also from Faber & Faber.
In 2003, the novel The Parts was published by Faber & Faber.
In 2006, Ridgway switched publishers, and his third novel, Animals, was published by 4th Estate, London.
Ridgway's work has been translated into several languages and has been published in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands, as well as in the USA.
[edit] Themes And Preoccupations
While Ridgway's writing has been varied in style and approach, a central theme seems to be the dislocation of central characters from the events and circumstances in which they find themselves. The Long Falling tells the story of an English woman married to a brutal husband and living in rural Ireland, who escapes her repressed environment and moves to Dublin, where she stays with her gay son. The tensions of their relationship, and the tensions between rural and urban Ireland, are played out against the background of "the X case", an actual event, in which a pregnant teenager was prevented by injunction from leaving the country to obtain an abortion in the U.K. The novel has been praised for "narrative skill, mastery of language, a humane insight into the muddles people make of their lives" (The Times, London).
In Standard Time, a collection of occasionally interconnected stories, the concentration is again on characters who proceed by way of confusion rather than understanding. They include gay lovers separated by language (The First Five Pages, The Problem With German); those clinging desperately to a poorly perceived notion of religious salvation (The Dreams Of Mary Cleary, The Ravages); a man who comes close to killing his child without quite realising it (Headwound); and a mysterious foreigner who inspires both desire and bafflement on the streets of Dublin (Angelo).
The Parts is Ridgway's longest and most expansive work to date. It collides the stories of six different people in turn of the century Dublin, relying for its focus on a young gay rent boy who acts both as catalyst and as personification of the city. Employing humour much more so than in previous work, The Parts again sets people at odds with their contexts, this time allowing the confusion and misunderstandings which arise to provoke as much laughter as pathos. It was described as "the finest and most truly funny Irish comic novel since At Swim-Two-Birds" by The Irish Times, whose readers voted it amongst the best Irish novels ever published[1].
In 2006, Animals marked another change of direction. For the first time in a novel, Ridgway employs a first person narrative, and moves away from his native Dublin as a setting. In an un-named city (clearly based on London) an illustrator comes across the corpse of a mouse on the street. A series of peculiar events follows, which cause the narrator to leave home and wander through the city, encountering an assortment of different people. The narrator is never named, nor gendered, nor is his or her partner. Perhaps more accessible in style than previous works, Animals is nevertheless infused with an unease which some reviewers have found difficult. It is "strange, beautiful and deeply troubling" according to The Sunday Independent.
[edit] Awards
The Long Falling, under its French title of Mauvaise Pente, was awarded both the Prix Femina Etranger and the Prix Premier Roman in Paris in 2001.
Ridgway was awarded The Rooney Prize For Irish Literature in 2001.
[edit] Biography
Born in Dublin in 1965, Ridgway was educated at Belvedere College and University College Dublin. Ridgway's first published work was poetry, and began to appear in publications such as Salmon in the late 1980s. His poetry was short listed for a Hennessy Award in 1989. In the early 1990s Ridgway's short stories began to appear in anthologies from Basement Press and others.
Ridgway became a full time writer in 1999, and moved from Dublin to London in 2000. He currently lives in north London.
