MAN BOOKER PRIZE

For the record here is the official press release from Coleman Getty:

THE GATHERING
WINS THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2007

www.themanbookerprize.com

‘Exhilaratingly bleak’ family epic wins

Anne Enright was tonight (Tuesday 16th October) named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Gathering, published by Jonathan Cape.

Anne Enright is the second Irish woman to win the prize, joining compatriots Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle and John Banville who won the prize in 1978, 1993 and 2005 respectively. The author recently said that her book was ‘a real weepie - the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood movie’.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin where she continues to live and work. She is the author of three previous novels: The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. Reviewers have called her winning book ‘distinctive’ in its ‘exhilarating bleakness’.

Chair of the judges, Howard Davies, made the announcement, which was broadcast live on the BBC Ten O’ Clock News, at the awards dinner at the Guildhall, London. Peter Clarke, Chief Executive of Man Group plc, presented Anne Enright with a cheque for £50,000.

Howard Davies commented,

“Anne Enright has written a powerful, uncomfortable and, at times, angry book. The Gathering is an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language.”

Over and above her prize of £50,000, Anne Enright is guaranteed a huge increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer-bound edition of their book.

The judging panel for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is: Howard Davies, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science; Wendy Cope, poet; Giles Foden, journalist and author; Ruth Scurr, biographer and critic, and Imogen Stubbs, actor and writer.

The Winner
The Gathering by Anne Enright
Jonathan Cape, £12.99

The Gathering is a family epic. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations – starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman – showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.
Anne Enright, 45, was born on 11th October 1962 in Dublin, where she now lives and works. After studying creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia, she worked for six years as a TV producer and director in Ireland. She has published one collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and three previous novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. What Are You Like? was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and won the Encore Award. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was published in 2004.

For further information or interview requests please contact:
Christian Lewis at Jonathan Cape
0207 840 8539 or clewis@randomhouse.co.uk