Keegan’s short novel, which could just as well be called a long short story, is stylistically lovely and imbued with her passion for seeing.

In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before disappearing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. It is now nominated for the Dublin Literary Award, presented annually for the best novel in the world written or translated into English.When she was a teenager, Joan Didion studied the opening to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a paragraph of “four deceptively simple sentences, 126 words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them.” A young writer today could study with similar pleasure the opening paragraph of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a novel set in a 20th century town that includes a Magdalen laundry, one of Ireland’s imprisoning institutions for unwed mothers: It also won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Ambassadors’ Prize for best Irish novel published in France, and The Kerry Prize for Irish novel of the year. Small Things Like These was published in 2021 by Grove Press and shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Murphy will next be seen leading frequent collaborator Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer which Universal releases in July.

The beloved series ended in 2022, with plans for a film continuation still in the works. Murphy played Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders over the course of a decade. We have gathered together a phenomenal team of creatives to make this film, and found exceptional partners in AE, a studio led by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck - actors and filmmakers I have admired for many years.” Said Murphy, “I’m honored and thrilled to have the opportunity to bring Claire Keegan’s magnificent novel to the screen. The film is an Irish production with additional funding coming from Screen Ireland and will be co-produced with Wilder Films in Belgium. Murphy and producer Alan Moloney commissioned the screenplay from Walsh, having optioned rights last year, and will produce through their production company Big Things Films this is the shingle’s first feature.įor Artists Equity, Damon and Drew Vinton will produce Affleck, Kevin Halloran and Michael Joe will executive produce. Enda Walsh, a longtime collaborator of Murphy’s, wrote the script. The project reunites director Tim Mielants and Murphy, who previously worked together on the BAFTA-winning Peaky Blinders.

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Little things like these