Literary Birthday – 2 October – Keith Ridgway

Happy Birthday, Keith Ridgway, born on 2 October 1965.

Keith Ridgway Quotes

1. I think fictional characters often seem far too well-equipped for the world in comparison to people I know, or to myself. I’m much more interested in writing about characters who don’t really know what it is they want, who don’t even know how they got to the place they’ve found themselves. They don’t know how to proceed, how to go forward, how to go back.
2. I try to move slowly. I write a lot that never finds its way into the finished book. I try not to make any decisions about these people, and I just try to allow them to grow in my imagination. Eventually they begin to take on aspects that I find convincing. Then I’m better able to write them.
3. I want to move through something, find out what it is, spend time there, see what it’s like. That’s what I want the reader to experience as well. I want them to spend some time with my characters. I want to throw a party.
4. I love writing. I was fed up with writing. So I stopped for a long time—I just didn’t bother anymore—but I came back to it a few years ago, and I really like it now. I get annoyed if I’m not able to do some writing. If I go a few days without having been able to do any writing, I start to get kind of angsty. Yeah, I enjoy it a lot.
5. I do a lot of thinking, but I don’t sketch out plans or plots in advance of writing. At points in the past, I felt it would be a good idea if I did that, and I tried to do it. It’s never worked for me.
6. I spent a lot of time thinking about characters, how they might sound and how they might move. I’m not particularly visual, so I don’t really have a clear idea of what somebody will look like, but I have an idea how they might walk, how they might slump over in their seat. And even though I don’t know their faces, I have the full portrait of a person.
7. I wanted to make explicit that you, the reader, are a voyeur, as is any reader of realist fiction. Having done that, I could not resist taking that other step, addressing the reader in tiny ways and giving them the feeling of being in it, and in some way implicating them in what is going on.

Source for quotes 1-5: Paris Review and 6-7: Tank

Keith Ridgway is an Irish novelist and short-story writer who writes literary fiction. He has lived in both Dublin and London, and his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, The Stinging Fly, and other publications. Ridgway’s debut novel, The Long Falling, won both the 2001 Prix Femina Étranger and the Premier Roman Étranger. His collection of short stories, Standard Time, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second novel, The Parts, and his novella Horses were both shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award in 2003. His novel A Shock was shortlisted for the 2021 Goldsmith Prize and won the 2022 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. His fiction often explores identity, relationships, isolation, memory, and the complexities of everyday life, combining psychological insight with an experimental approach to storytelling. Ridgway’s latest novel, Dooneen, was published in 2026.

Source for photograph: RCW Literary Agency

by Amanda Patterson
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