Anne Enright won the Booker Prize for The Gathering. Her latest novel, The Wren, The Wren, came out in 2023. She has written in the LRB about the long afterlife of the HeLa cells taken from a woman about to die of cervical cancer, her grandmother’s friendship with James Joyce’s sister, and in ‘Antigone in Galway’, about the fate of the troublesome women sent to Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. Attention: Selected Essays was published in November.
On 3 August, after a long drive from Dubrovnik Airport, we turned off the Adriatic Highway to rendezvous with a guy on a motorbike, who would show us the way through the darkness to our holiday rental three kilometres further on. The bike’s tail light disappeared around hairpin bends, through patches of construction and unfinished road, before finally plunging down a tiny lane with,...
In 1985, Helen Garner picked up the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature in a bookshop in Melbourne and examined its index to confirm that she was not in it. On finding she was right, she felt the world seesaw and walked away wretched. ‘I am crude, a beginner. People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at 42 I can’t even get into the Oxford...
In the first Covid lockdown of spring 2020, people in Ireland were confined to a two kilometre radius from home. Exemptions were made for carers and, if I went to see my elderly mother in the middle of the afternoon, the roads were empty of traffic and the suburban paths near her house filled with people walking to the edge of their allocated space and then back home. A handy app showed a...
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970, opens with a brief, antic mash-up of a child’s first reading primer. ‘Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family.’ These lines are not familiar to me and then they are, sort of – it’s like seeing a person across a room and wondering if it’s someone you know.
A postmodernist would not hesitate to stroll across his own page with his future wife on his arm. Did modernism turn ‘post’ when Borges put himself in ‘The Aleph’? And I don’t know if my sense of sudden insight (yes! of course it did!) is just what happens when a person reads Ulysses: they experience large, elusive thoughts; they feel very stupid or foolishly, vertiginously clever.
Anne Enright talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her latest novel, Actress, and other works.
Anne Enright delivers her lecture on how corruptions of the Adam and Eve story have poisoned relations between men and women.
Anne Enright introduces her book The Green Road, reveals what men ask her at dinner parties, and decides what superpower she would like.
Anne Enright reads two stories from her collection Taking Pictures and takes questions from the audience.
One thing Enright’s The Wren, The Wren is sure of is that there is no such thing as completion, or a fresh start. Many of its images are variations on the theme of traces, leftovers, the aspects...
If Anne Enright’s stories took a physical form, I imagine they would be a well-dressed woman screaming into a silk pillowcase. Which is to say, I love them.
H egel believed that happiness was largely confined to the private life, a view that would scarcely survive a reading of the modern novel. A lot of fiction since the early 20th century takes...
The Gathering – Anne Enright’s fourth novel, and her best – is aware of its heritage, of the books that have gone before it. It makes use of familiar signals and motifs. It is...
Both these outstanding women novelists have decided, with deliberate and rewarding feminist intent, to resuscitate and make central the lives of women whose stories have been overshadowed by the...
In Anne Enright’s collection The Portable Virgin (published in 1991) the first story is about Cathy, who works in the handbag department of a large Dublin store. Cathy classifies the...
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