Anne Enright

The first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015-2018), writer Anne Enright was born in Dublin. Throughout her formidable body of work, which includes eight novels and two short story collections, Enright has explored the theme of the family in ways that feel nothing short of momentous. Her domestic portraits are startingly potent in that they contain within them all the most pressing issues of our time—from suicide to changing sexual norms and environmental collapse. In her Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Gathering (2007), Enright displays the majestic heights of her prose in depictions of intergenerational wounds and reparations. Many critics have rushed to sing Enright’s praise describing her novels as elegant studies of all that remains unsaid between intimates. Hailed as a master of her form, Enright’s deceptively simple language reveals powerful associations. In The Green Road (2015), an innocuous description of local town shops includes a butcher’s, “his trays of meat fenced around by bloodstained plastic grass.” As a writer, Enright has always refused categorization leading to an inventive prose all her own. With her iconoclastic daring, Enright is skillfully able to wield shifts in narrative styles, viewpoints, and time to echo the true-to-life nature of consciousness and memory.