Anne Enright
Anne Enright
Anne Teresa Enright FRSLis an Irish author. She has published novels, short stories, essays, and one non-fiction book. 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...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 October 1962
CountryIreland
trying stuff accuracy
Try to be accurate about stuff.
dream men lines
There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.
way-forward people fiction
People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.
real writing what-matters
Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
writing world opinion
Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
nice home two
Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.
heart left my-own
I have no place left to live but in my own heart.
book self dying
Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
people
People do not change, they are merely revealed.
writing giving matter
I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
character ifs bits
If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.
book winning people
I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
jobs book writing
You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
writing long way
The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.