Anne Enright
Anne Enright is perhaps best known for her 2007 novel The Gathering, for which she won the Man Booker prize, prevailing over assumptions that being nominated in a ‘McEwan Year’ meant sure disappointment. The decision to award her the prize was unanimous.
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Anne Enright's novel set in Dublin's boom and bust years and charting an affair through lust, bliss and denial. Read by Niamh Cusack
From the archive
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The author joins Mariella Frostrup to discuss The Green Road, a family saga which travels from County Clare to New York and Africa, and her inaugural role as the Irish fiction laureate.
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Enright takes questions from James Naughtie and a group of readers in April 2012 as the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4 Bookclub gather to talk about her best known novel The Gathering.
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Following her appointment as Ireland's first Laureate for Fiction, Enright discusses her novel The Green Road with Anne McElvoy on Radio 3 in May 2015.
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In November 2010 Enright spoke to Kirsty Lang on Front Row to discuss the traditions and traits of short stories from Ireland on the release of the new Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, which the author edited.
About the author
After studying English and Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, Anne Enright went on to study for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia under the prestigious tutelage of Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.
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Carter described her 1991 collection of short stories The Portable Virgin as “elegant, scrupulously poised, always intelligent and, not least, original.” Enright followed this in 1995 with her first novel The Wig my Father Wore, a poignant and often humorous portrayal of Irish family life.
Continuing with the theme of Irish family life, her 2007 novel The Gathering tells the story of the Hegarty family who are obliged to come together in the wake of their Brother Liam’s suicide.
Enright says The Gathering is “a book that I grew like mushrooms in the dark.” The novel certainly exudes darkness as it sifts through half-forgotten memories, focusing less on what exactly happened to this family, but how it happened.
Enright has been described as a writer of almost savage honesty in her depictions of love, sex, family relationships and Catholicism in her writing, though her dry sense of humour and sometimes surreal prose style combine with this to create an acute exploration into family life.
Enright’s 2011 book The Forgotten Waltz tells the story of adultery in a pleasant suburb of Dublin. Her unflagging commitment to the representation of Ireland, and Irish life, makes her 2015 appointment as the first Irish fiction laureate truly deserved.
As the chair, Paul Muldoon, put it: “Anne Enright’s fiction has helped the Irish make sense of their lives for the past quarter century – and helped the rest of the world understand Ireland.”
Sophie Lloyd-Catchpole, Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Readings Unit
