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Claire Adam Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author

Claire Adam
photo: Tricia Keracher-Summerfield

Claire Adam

Claire Adam Biography

Claire Adam's debut novel, Golden Child, was published by Sarah Jessica Parker's SJP for Hogarth. It was listed as one of the BBC's "100 Novels That Shaped Our World" and was awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, and the McKitterick Prize. She was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She studied physics at Brown University and later received an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Adam lives in London.



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Interview

An interview with Claire Adam about her debut novel Golden Child, which is set in Trinidad and follows the lives of a family as they navigate impossible choices about scarcity, loyalty, and love.

What was the impetus for this particular story to be your first in novel form?

The impetus for this story was the father, Clyde. Before I really started work on this novel, Clyde had already taken up residence in my mind as a fully formed character. I knew the dilemmas he would face and what the eventual outcome would be. But I had to discover how events unfolded, figure out exactly who else was involved. I've always seen him as an intensely lonely man with a tendency to isolate himself because he considers it the only safe way to exist in the world--or at least in Trinidad, which is the world in which he lives. He's not always a likable character.

You would think that I would have had the power to make him more likable, or to have him make decisions that people would find easy to live with, but I didn't feel like I had much power over Clyde. Sometimes it felt like Clyde was looking up at me from within his world, shaking his fist and telling me, "Don't you dare!" Don't you dare change me, he meant. If anything, I felt as if I was using my authorial power to protect him from the world's judgment.

The more I explored Clyde's life, and his sons' lives, the more I discovered the people ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Claire Adam at BookBrowse
Love Forms jacket Golden Child jacket
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