Enright Wins Booker Prize

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Irish Voice News

Enright Wins Booker Prize

October 17, 2007

By Cahir O’Doherty

IRISH writer Anne Enright won the prestigious Booker Man Prize at a ceremony in London on Tuesday.

Enright, 45, is the second Irish writer to win the prize in the past three years, after John Banville’s The Sea won in 2005. Short listed this spring, Enright’s winning novel, The Gathering, is a luminous meditation on love and family connectedness, and was considered the least likely to win this year’s $100,000 award.

Dublin-born Enright has published three previous novels, two short-story collections and one nonfiction book to date. Her victory was another surprise from an award renowned for unpredictable results. Bookmakers had made Enright the rank outsider to win, with bookies William Hill giving her 20-1 odds.

The Booker winning novel introduces us to 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty, a wife and mother whose life takes a dramatic turn when her brother Liam fills his pockets with stones and takes a walk into the sea at Brighton beach.

From there on Enright’s story unfolds in language that’s so vivid and transformative it keeps you from becoming mired in the unremitting sorrowfulness of her tale.

Enright agrees that the book is often unflinchingly austere. In a recent interview with the Irish Voice she said, “It’s not saccharine, it’s not sentimental. The character Veronica isn’t very sentimental either. It wasn’t in any way autobiographical, but I’ve worked on it so long that feels like it’s become autobiographical. I’ve been so weathered into this life that Veronica was living.”

Praised by fellow her Irish novelist Colm Toibin for a prose style that’s “as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion’s,” Enright’s latest has nonetheless divided the critics who have hailed its brilliance or lamented its unremittingly dark subject matter and treatment. Enright believes that some of their objections are a result of her fanatical interest in style.

Says Enright, “People who don’t want to be looking at the sentences, people who just want the prose to be transparent feel – and they’re right to feel – that there is something narcissistic about style. And so they feel that my approach is cold.”

The Booker, which is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies, was founded in 1969 and since then has provided delight and controversy in about equal measure.

Asked by the Irish Voice about her nomination, Enright pleaded that as a wife, mother and celebrated novelist she hadn’t had time to take it in.

“When I looked at my computer recently I was amazed to see that I’ve received 400 emails from different people congratulating me on the nomination. It’s only the odd time that I catch myself having a little fantasy about it. All writers fantasize about the Booker. But this time I actually am going to the ball.”

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