Anne Enright Wins Man Booker Prize

Story from The New York Times

The Irish author Anne Enright won the Man Booker prize on Tuesday night for “The Gathering,” a novel in which a woman’s journey home with the body of her dead brother leads her to unearth and confront three generations’ worth of hidden family secrets.

Howard Davies, the chairman of the judges’ panel, praised Ms. Enright’s “tough and striking language” and said she had written a “powerful, uncomfortable and, at times, angry book.”
The Man Booker prize, Britain’s best-known literary award, is given annually to a novel written by an author from Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth and carries with it a check for £50,000 (roughly $102,000) and the promise of increased visibility and sales.

“The Gathering” has drawn glowing reviews — “Abrasively honest and toweringly moving, it grabs and shakes you, rabbiting on in a manic monologue, comical, tragic, lost and profound,” Tom Adair wrote in The Scotsman — but it is a surprise winner, an outsider on a six-book list of finalists. At Ladbroke’s bookmakers, it was given just a 12-to-1 chance of winning. Ms. Enright said of her win that she had been “ready for anything — except possibly that.”
Speaking to BBC Radio 4, she added: “I am still churning it through. Tomorrow, I’ll wake up and go ‘whoopee.’ “

Ms. Enright, 45, is a former television producer and director in Ireland. Her previous work includes three novels, a book of short stories and a work of nonfiction. She once said of “The Gathering” — an epic about a suicide, alcoholism, sexual troubles, repression and other family dysfunctions — that readers should not expect to be cheered up by it. “It is the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepy,” she said.

Speaking after the award, Mr. Adair said that Ms. Enright’s book was “not everybody’s first choice,” but rather “a choice with which all the judges were happy.” The judges took two and a half hours to reach their decision, he said.

The favorites to win this year were Ian McEwan, for “On Chesil Beach,” a devastating account of a repressed British couple’s disastrous wedding night on the eve of the sexual revolution; and the New Zealand author Lloyd Jones, for “Mr. Pip,” the story of a war-torn island cut off from the world in which an entire school curriculum is based around a reading of Dickens’s “Great Expectations,” with unforeseen consequences.