Keith Ridgway

Keith Ridgway is an Irish novelist born in Dublin in 1965. He studied at University College Dublin and has lived in London for many years. His novels include The Long Falling (1998), The Parts (2003), Animals (2006), and Hawthorn & Child (2012). His fiction is notable for its dark comedy, its formal inventiveness, and its exploration of urban life, violence, and queerness. A Shock (2021, Picador) is his fourth novel, a formally disorienting work built from linked stories set in a single unnamed city, following a network of characters connected by urban proximity and chance. It won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2021 and was widely celebrated as one of the most original British novels of recent years. Ridgway is known for his dry, unsettling humour and his ability to render psychological states with unusual precision. He has also written radio drama and short fiction.