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Anne Enright takes the Booker

Outsider beats favourites to scoop prize for tale of dysfunctional family life set in Ireland





Against all the odds, and seeing off competition from favourites Ian McEwan and Lloyd Jones, rank outsider Anne Enright was tonight awarded the Man Booker prize for her "powerful, uncomfortable and even at times angry book" The Gathering.

Howard Davies, chair of the panel, described it as "an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language". No picnic, it was described by the Observer's critic as "a story of family dysfunction, made distinctive by an exhilarating bleakness of tone". Davies said: "It's accessible. It's somewhat bitter - but it's perfectly accessible. People will be pretty excited by it when they read it."


Enright herself told Radio 4's Today programme this morning: "When people pick up a book they may want something happy that will cheer them up. In that case they shouldn't really pick up my book. It's the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie".

Enright's victory wins her a total of £52,500, including the £2,500 accorded to each shortlisted writer.

McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Jones's Mister Pip were the novels vying for position as bookies' favourite in the weeks leading up to last night's announcement.

The judging process was, Davies said, "tight". Every book "had its advocate". He described the judges as "a congenial group of people" but not necessarily one from whom consensus easily flowed. Accordingly, as befitted the director of the London School of Economics, he devised what he called an ingenious selection of voting systems: a weighted system, a simple ranking system and single transferable vote. Each confirmed Enright as the winner.

The Gathering is narrated by Veronica, as she prepares for the funeral of Liam, one of her many larger-than-life, unruly siblings. The novel casts back down the generations as Veronica - apparently leading a calm, stable, successful life as a well-off wife and mother - attempts to make sense of her turbulent, fragile history and that of her dysfunctional clan. AL Kennedy, reviewing the book in the Guardian, wrote: "Enright's work is neither mindless nor inhuman; it is clearly the product of a remarkable intelligence, combined with a gift for observation and deduction. She has uncovered the truth that sometimes our great adventures are interior."

A Dubliner - and the second Irish writer in three years to win the prize after John Banville took it in 2005 - Enright studied philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin before working for Ireland's national broadcaster RTE as a producer. These were stressful years and Enright struggled with depression. She has said: "I heartily recommend having a breakdown young: then you make your decisions and get on with it. I see people who are in permanent crisis, like a chronically faulty car. The exhaust is permanently hanging off the back of their life. If the car broke down completely, they'd have to get it fixed. There would be no more messing."

She left her job and began to write; first a well-received collection of stories called The Portable Virgin, then three novels and a work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, published in 2004.

Disappointed though he will doubtless be, Ian McEwan can at least take comfort from his incredibly healthy sales. On Chesil Beach is far outselling the other books on the shortlist combined (not to mention the surge of sales for Atonement in the wake of Joe Wright's film). Sales figures of the other books, by contrast, exemplify the tough climate for literary fiction in the marketplace - and Enright's book has so far shifted just 3,253 copies. The latest figures from Nielsen BookScan show that the McEwan has sold a total of 120,362; Nicola Barker's Darkmans, 11,097; Mister Pip, 5,170; Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist 4,425, and Indra Sinha's Animal's People 2,589.

This year's judges, chaired by Davies, are poet Wendy Cope, author and journalist Giles Foden, biographer and critic Ruth Scurr, and actor Imogen Stubbs. Last year's Man Booker prize-winner was Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.
guardian

I've just finished reading Animal's People and it was brilliant. Anyone read any of the others?

ellie? Bboop?

I haven't as yet TD but I may give the winner a go. I don't always get along with man booker prize books though. Sometimes I read them and wonder how they ever got shortlisted

Anne Enright lives in my town.

(that's about the height of my literary expertise....but it's nice to have some good news about this town for a change).



Now, that's a good quote...must have a look at my exhaust.

I haven't read any of her books TD and to be hoenst, when I saw the press report of her slagging of the McCanns, saying she hated them for not showing enough emotion etc on telly, it has put me right of her, so as a protest I won't buy her book.

You're right ellie, that certainly won't help her book sales.

Well I believe from what I have read (if you can ever believe that lol) that she has only sold just over 3000 books anyway, though obviously a lot of people will now buy it, to see if it is deserving of the prize and this isn't unusual for a first novel to only sell this amount at the beginning. My problem with it, is not that she has an opinion (after all we all have an opinion), but that she used the public platform of her win, to add fuel to a case, which has already had so much press (most of it speculation) and which possibly innocent people have been villified by a media and public feeding frenzy, which sickens me and does nothing to help the plight of this missing child or indeed any other missing children. I dread to think about how the press will behave when the next case of a missing child comes up and I think this author should have kept her thoughts private.

In saying that of course, perhaps her words have been taken out of context by the press.

I totally agree with your points about 'the McCann case' and the far-reaching consequences of how it's being dealt with in the media, Ellie. I didn't know Anne Enright had commented on it.

I've looked up the Telegraph link. The original essay was written before she got the prize...and it seems she's attempting to analyse why 'disliking the McCanns is an international sport'.



A bit unfortunate that she felt the need to broadcast her own theories, at this time.

I did read through the article and did personally think that she was being very unfair to the McCanns for not presenting the public persona, for a very personal tragedy, that she feels is the most fitting. After all, who amongst us, unless we have had a similar tragedy can judge how we would behave publicly at such a time? But then again, perhaps I am judging her too harshly. I hope if she her comments have been taken out of context that she is given a chance to put this right.