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
certain fingers grown taken until
There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.
boring early happen marriage proven recently stories worst wrote
Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong.
believed celtic deciding ireland kitsch national series starting stories
Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite.
gap gathering kinds secret text
There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge.
apart bottom brink early falls hit life people
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.
amazing dull life
There's no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life that is not abnormal. We all have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives.
grandparent static surnames
In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.
effects hard
It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
feelings needs clear
When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.
thinking phones talking
I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain?
clever writing thinking
I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.
roots narrative monsters
I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
lovely old-fashioned raised
I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
hate games play
Here we go again. Always a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on. Push me pull you. Come here and i'll tell you how much i hate you. Hang on a minute while i leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be.