Irish writer Anne Enright won the Man Booker fiction prize Tuesday for “The Gathering,” an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family.
She is the second Irish writer to win the prize in the past three years, after John Banville’s “The Sea” in 2005.
Enright had been considered a long-shot to take Britain’s most prestigious, and contentious, literary trophy. The award, which carries a prize of $100,000, was bestowed during a ceremony at London’s medieval Guildhall.
“The Gathering” is a family epic set in England and Ireland, in which a brother’s suicide prompts 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty to probe her family’s troubled, tangled history. The judges praised it as “a very accomplished and dramatic novel of family relationships and personal breakdown.”
Enright said people looking for a cheery read should not pick up her book. “It is the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepy,” she said.
Howard Davies, the chairman of the judging panel, acknowledged the book was “a little bleak” in places, but praised it as “a very readable novel.”
“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,” he said.
Enright said the book’s focus on family was a classically Irish theme.
“I think family is a hugely interesting place, it’s a place where stories happen. … And it’s also a central Irish institution,” said Enright, who acknowledged feeling a bit “trembly” when she heard she had won.
Jonathan Ruppin of British bookstore Foyles called the judges’ choice “a welcome boost for serious literature.”
“Not everyone will be comfortable with this bleak account of conflict and despair, but the writing is undeniably exquisite,” he said.
Dublin-born Enright, 45, has published three previous novels, two short-story collections and the nonfiction book “Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood.”
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.
Betting on literary prizes — as well as on television reality shows, election results and potential royal weddings — is a long-standing tradition in Britain. “Mister Pip” by New Zealand’s Lloyd Jones and British novelist Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach” had been strongly favored.
But the Booker judges have a history of defying the odds when awarding the prize, which usually brings a huge sales boost for the winner. The favorite has not won since 2002, when Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” took the prize.
Another popular choice that lost out was Mohsin Hamid’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” the story of a middle-class Pakistani in New York whose relationship with his adopted home changes radically after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The other nominees were English writer Nicola Barker’s “Darkmans,” a sprawling supernatural saga set in the town of Ashford in southern England, hailed by the panel as “an ambitious and energetic contemporary ghost story”; “and “Animal’s People,” a novel about the Bhopal chemical disaster by India’s Indra Sinha.
The prize, which is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies, was founded in 1969 and was long known as the Booker Prize. It was renamed when the financial services conglomerate Man Group PLC began sponsoring it five years ago.
Who is she:
Anne Enright (born 1962 in Dublin) is a Booker Prize-winning Irish author. She has published essays, short stories, a non-fiction book and four novels.
She was educated in Trinity College Dublin, in Canada and at the University of East Anglia, where she earned an M.A. in the creative writing course and was taught by Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury.[3] For six years, she was a television producer and director for RTÉ in Dublin.She began writing full-time in 1993.
Her writings have appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Granta, and collected in The Portable Virgin, her 1991 work which won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature that year. Her novels include The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, which won the Royal Society of Authors Encore Prize and was short-listed for the Whitbread Novel Award, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch and The Gathering (2007). Occasional essays appear in the London Review of Books, the Dublin Review, and the Irish Times. Her non-fiction book about motherhood, Making Babies, was published in 2005.
She was once a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 and RTÉ, and now reviews for The Guardian. On 16 October 2007 she was awarded the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering which includes a £50,000 prize.
She is married to Martin Murphy, and lives in Bray, County Wicklow.
About the Booker prize via wikipedia
History
The prize was originally known as the Booker-McConnell Prize after the company Booker-McConnell began sponsoring the event in 1968, and became commonly known as the “Booker Prize” or simply “the Booker”. When administration of the prize was transferred to the Booker Prize Foundation in 2002, the title sponsor became the investment company Man Group, which opted to retain “Booker” as part of the official title of the prize. The prize money awarded with the Booker Prize was originally £21,000, and was subsequently raised to £50,000 in 2002 under the sponsorship of the Man Group.
Judging
The selection process for the winner of the prize commences with the formation of an advisory committee which includes an author, two publishers, a literary agent, a bookseller, a librarian, and a chairperson appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation. The advisory committee then selects the judging panel, the membership of which changes each year, although on rare occasions a judge may be selected a second time.
To maintain the consistent excellence of the prize, judges are selected from amongst leading literary critics, writers, academics and notable public figures.
Booker Prize winners
Booker facts & statistics
* Each publisher’s imprint may submit two titles. In addition, previous winners of the Prize and those who have been shortlisted in the previous ten years are automatically considered. Books may also be ‘called in’: publishers can make written representations to the judges to consider titles in addition to those already entered. In the twenty-first century the average number of books considered by the judges has been approximately 130.
* The list of books making the longlist was first released in 2001. In 2003 there were 23 books on the longlist, in 2002 there were 20 and in 2001 there were 24.
* For the first 35 years of the Booker there were only five years when fewer than six books were on the shortlist, and two years (1980 and 1981) when there were seven on the shortlist.
* As of (2003):
o Over the first 35 years there were a total of 201 novels from 134 authors on the shortlists.
o Of the 97 novelists nominated once, there were 13 winners and three co-winners.
o Of the 19 novelists nominated twice, there were seven winners and one two-time winner (J. M. Coetzee).
o Of the ten novelists nominated three times, there were four winners, one co-winner and one two-time winner (Peter Carey).
o Of the six four-time nominees, all but William Trevor have won once. The other four-time nominees are Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Keneally and Penelope Fitzgerald.
o There have only been two five-time nominees, Margaret Atwood (first nominated in 1986 and won in 2000) and Beryl Bainbridge (nominated twice in the 1970s and three times in the 1990s, but she has never won).
o There has been only one six-time nominee, Iris Murdoch, who won on her fourth nomination in 1978 and was nominated twice more in the 1980s
