Anne Enright

Anne Enright
Anne Enright at Literaturhaus Köln (Cologne, Germany), 18 November 2008
Born	(1962-10-11) 11 October 1962 Dublin, Ireland
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	Irish
Alma mater	Trinity College, Dublin University of East Anglia
Period	1991 – present
Genres	Essay, Novel, Short Story
Subjects	Family relationships, love and sex, Irish history, the zeitgeist
Notable work(s)	The Portable Virgin The Wig My Father Wore What Are You Like? The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch The Gathering The Forgotten Waltz
Notable award(s)	Rooney Prize for Irish Literature 1991 Encore Award 2001 Man Booker Prize 2007 Irish Novel of the Year 2008
Spouse(s)	Martin Murphy
Children	One son, one daughter
Influences Edna O'Brien, Angela Carter

Anne Enright FRSL (born 11 October 1962) is an Irish author. She graduated from the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course. She lives in Bray, County Wicklow, with her husband and children. She has published essays, short stories, a non-fiction book and four novels.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. She has also won the 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2001 Encore Award and the 2008 Irish Novel of the Year.

Before winning the Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favourably reviewed and widely praised. Her writing explores themes such as family relationships, love and sex, Ireland's difficult past and its modern zeitgeist.

Biography

Enright won an international scholarship to Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, where she studied for an International Baccalaureate for two years. She received an English and philosophy degree from Trinity College, Dublin. She began writing in earnest when her family gave her an electric typewriter for her 21st birthday. She won a scholarship to the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course, where she was taught by Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury and earned an M.A..

Enright was a television producer and director for RTÉ in Dublin for six years. She was a producer for the ground-breaking RTÉ programme Nighthawks for four years. She then worked in children's programming for two years and wrote at the weekends. Enright began writing full-time in 1993. Her full-time career as a writer came about when she left television due to a breakdown, later remarking: "I recommend it [...] having a breakdown early. If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble."

Enright lives in Bray, County Wicklow. She is married to Martin Murphy, who is director of the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire. They have two children, a son and daughter.

Work

Enright's early work has often been compared by critics to that of Flann O'Brien. The Portable Virgin, a collection of her short stories, was published in 1991. Angela Carter called it "elegant, scrupulously poised, always intelligent and, not least, original."

Enright's first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, was published in 1995. The book explores themes such as love, motherhood, Roman Catholicism, and sex. The narrator of the novel is Grace, who lives in Dublin and works for a tacky game show. Her father wears a wig that cannot be spoken of in front of him. An angel called Stephen who committed suicide in 1934 and has come back to earth to guide lost souls moves into Grace's home and she falls in love with him.

Enright's next novel, What Are You Like? (2000), is about twin girls called Marie and Maria who are separated at birth and raised apart from each other in Dublin and London. It looks at tensions and ironies between family members. It was short-listed in the novel category of the Whitbread Awards. The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) is a fictionalised account of the life of Eliza Lynch, an Irish woman who was the consort of Paraguayan president Francisco Solano López and became Paraguay's most powerful woman in the 19th century. Her book Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004) is a collection of candid and humorous essays about childbirth and motherhood. Enright's fourth novel, The Gathering, was published in 2007.

Enright's writings have appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, the London Review of Books, the Dublin Review and the Irish Times. She was once a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, and now reviews for The Guardian and RTÉ. The 4 October 2007 issue of the London Review of Books published her essay, "Disliking the McCanns", about Kate and Gerry McCann, the British parents of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in suspicious circumstances while on holiday in Portugal in May 2007. The essay was criticised by some journalists.

In 2011, the Irish Academic Press published a collection of essays on Enright's work, edited by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill.

Awards

• 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, winner, The Portable Virgin
• 2001 Encore Award, winner, What Are You Like?
• 2004 Davy Byrne's Irish Writing Award
• 2007 Man Booker Prize, winner, The Gathering
• 2008 Irish Novel of the Year, winner, The Gathering
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction, shortlist, The Forgotten Waltz
• 2012 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, winner, The Forgotten Waltz

Booker Prize

On 6 September 2007, she was announced as being on the shortlist for that year's Man Booker Prize. The Gathering surprisingly went on to win, netting Anne a cash award of £50,000, on 16 October 2007. After four hours sleep, she spent the following day being interviewed in a windowless room "as apparent punishment for her triumph" and received a call from President of Ireland Mary McAleese's aide-de-camp as she attempted to "stop myself becoming Irish literature's equivalent of Sonia O'Sullivan."

List of works

Books

• The Portable Virgin (1991)
• The Wig My Father Wore (1995)
• What Are You Like? (2000)
• The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002)
• Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004, Jonathan Cape, UK)
• The Gathering (2007)
• Taking Pictures (2008)
• Yesterday's Weather (2009)
• The Forgotten Waltz (2011)
• Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2012, W. W. Norton, US)

Articles

• "What’s left of Henrietta Lacks?", London Review of Books. 13 April 2000.
• "My Milk", London Review of Books. 5 October 2000.
• "Diary: Listen to Heloïse", London Review of Books. 10 May 2007.
• "Diary: Disliking the McCanns", London Review of Books. 4 October 2007.
• "Natalie", The New Yorker (short story).
• "Little Sister" Granta, issue 75.
• "Shaft" Granta, issue 85.
• "Diary", London Review of Books 33 (4), 17 February 2011: 38–39, retrieved 11 February 2011.  Subject: Angela Carter

External links

• Anne Enright's top 10 slim volumes, The Guardian, 21 March 2001
• Transcript of interview with Ramona Koval on The Book Show, ABC Radio National, 15 September 2008, recorded at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2008
• Audio and video interviews with Anne Enright at RTÉ.ie.
• 2002 interview with Anne Enright in The Sunday Business Post.
• Podcast of Anne Enright discussing her Man Booker Prize at the Shanghai International Literary Festival
• "The TLS on Anne Enright": a collection of pieces on Anne Enright from The Times Literary Supplement, 17 October 2007.
• An interview and a reading from The Gathering on La Clé des langues, May 2010
• 2011 radio interview at The Bat Segundo Show
• "Anne Enright, August 2008." Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland by Jody Allen Randolph. Manchester: Carcanet, 2010.