Photo credit: Tricia Keracher-Summerfield
About Claire
I’m originally from Trinidad and Tobago — born in the capital city of Port of Spain in 1974. My mother is the artist Mary Adam, and my father was Dr Malcolm Adam (b. 1932), a lecturer in medicine at the University of the West Indies.
I grew up in Trinidad, the youngest of four children. (I attended St Bernadette’s Prep in St Ann’s, then St Joseph’s Convent, Port of Spain.)
Read more in this interview in Caribbean Beat magazine.
Every three years, we spent the summer in Ireland, visiting my mother’s family in Loughine, Co. Cork.
Read more in this interview in the Irish Times.
Mirroring the story of Golden Child, each of my siblings and I left Trinidad at the age of 18, on academic scholarships to universities in North America.
Here more in this video of a talk I gave at a Library Journal conference in New York, introduced by Sarah Jessica Parker.
I left Trinidad for Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where I majored in Physics. (I’m Class of 1996.) I really did like Physics, but I also liked many other subjects, including humanities and writing.
After Brown, I moved to Europe, and lived between Italy and Ireland for a few years before settling in the UK.
In the UK, I took an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2011, where I started work on Golden Child.
My parents carried on living in Trinidad until they were in their 80s (and I was in my 40s), and during that time, I went back frequently to visit. These days, I visit less often - every couple of years. Most of my father’s extended family still live in Trinidad.
So where’s home? Read my essay here. (Everyone likes this essay.)
Nowadays, I live in south London with my husband and two children. In addition to my own writing, I work as a tutor and mentor through the Goldsmiths MA in Creative Writing in London, and Faber Academy. I also review books for the Guardian and the Irish Times.
Read my latest Guardian review here.
I travel to visit family in the USA (Pennsylvania and Illinois), Ireland (Cork), and New Zealand (Auckland), as well as Trinidad. If you’re in one of those places and would like to say hi next time I’m in town, do drop me a line.
How to contact me.
Novels
Golden Child was published in 2019, by Faber (UK), SJP for Hogarth (USA/Canada), and in translation. It won multiple prizes and was selected as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Shaped our World’.
More about Golden Child.
Love Forms was published 2025, by Faber (UK) and Hogarth (USA/Canada), with translations forthcoming. It was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
More about Love Forms.