Booker Winner Anne Enright
Bibliography of the Author and Review of The Gathering
When the result of the Man Booker Prize was announced on 16th October 2007, the winner came as a surprise to most. Who exactly is Enright, and is The Gathering any good?
Early Life and Works
Anne Enright was born on the 11th October 1962 in Dublin. She studied for a degree in English and Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and then won a scholarship to undertake a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Here she was taught by such greats as Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, but she initially followed a career in television before becoming a successful writer.
During her six years as a producer and director at RTE in Dublin, Enright wrote in her free time and eventually saw the publication of a book of short stories, The Portable Virgin, in 1991. The success of this volume, which won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1991, allowed her to become a full-time writer in 1993.
Despite this early promise, Enright’s early works were not well known until her recent Booker win pushed her into the spotlight. Her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, was published in 1995, and this was followed by What Are You Like? in 2000 and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch in 2002. She also produced a volume on motherhood, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood in 2004 following the birth of her own two children.
The Gathering
The Gathering was published in 2007, and achieved only moderate success before being placed on the Booker shortlist. Enright was seen as a real outsider in the competition, and was considered unlikely to win due to her low profile, particularly as she was up against established names such as previous winner Ian McEwan.
The book itself was seen as perhaps being too bleak to win the coveted prize, dealing as it does with a family who have gathered together in the aftermath of a suicide. The novel is narrated by thirty nine year-old Veronica Hegarty: it is one of her brothers, Liam, who has killed himself. She feels his death particularly strongly as they were only 11 months apart in age, and the novel follows Veronica’s grieving determination to find out exactly why Liam has taken his own life.
The novel is not a sentimental family tale: the Hegartys have plenty of secrets which Veronica must disentangle, and she herself is not a particularly likeable narrator. She is honest in her dislike of certain aspects of her family, and her inability to deal with long-suppressed secrets leads her to become less and less rational as the novel progresses.
Overall, this is not a novel to be taken lightly: its contents certainly leave the reader mentally drained. The quality of the writing in the book suggests, however, that this year’s Booker win was not a fluke, and that Enright’s name will remain familiar in literary circles for years to come.
The Gathering by Anne Enright is published by Jonathan Cape, 2007.
