Oct 18: After Noble Prize bestowment, here comes another moment of celebration, the world’s one of the most prestigious award for literature comes to grace Anne Enright, an Irish woman at a ceremony in London’s Guildhall.
Anne Enright was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, for her novel “The Gathering" on Tuesday.
This novel essentially moves around the painful suffering of a family, Veronica Hegarty, the protagonist move from one chapter to another narrating how a family passes through agonies after she lost her brother Liam.
The words go beneath the skin, creating uneasiness, the story traces through three generation of a family.
She walks ahead of Ian Mc Ewan, who earlier had won this prize in 1998, and Lloyd Jones.
Enright said "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 is the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie."
She added "Why go to sad films? Why read a sad book? ... It releases something, or enables something."
Howard Davies, one of the member of judging panel for the prize, hailed the novel as "a powerful, uncomfortable and, at times, angry book."
"We think she is an impressive novelist, we expect to hear a lot more from her.
"The book is powerful, it pulls you along and it has an absolutely brilliant ending. It has one of the best last sentences of any novel I have ever read."
Davies confessed that though it had been a tight decision but the decision in the end was unanimous.
The other five books that were shortlisted were "Darkmans" (Nicola Barker), "Animal People" (Indra Sinha), "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" (Mohsin Hamid), "Mister Pip" (Lloyd Jones), and "On Chesil Beach" (Ian McEwan).
Enright's had trailed on the popularity list on Internet retailer Amazon.co.uk.
She becomes the second author from Ireland to win the prize in three years, after John Banville won it in 2005 with "The Sea".
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.
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).Her non-fiction book about motherhood, Making Babies, was published in 2005.
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, , is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of United Kingdom ,the Commonwealth of Nations or the Republic of Ireland.
The prize money awarded with the Booker Prize was originally £21,000, and was subsequently raised to £50,000 in 2002.
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