Anna Burns wins Booker Prize with Troubles tale ‘Milkman’

Anna Burns (pictured below right) won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction on Tuesday night with Milkman – a both vibrant and violent story about men, women, conflict and power set during Northern Ireland’s years of Catholic-Protestant violence. Burns is the first writer from Northern Ireland to win the £50,000 (Dh242,000) prize, which is open to English-language authors from around the world. She received her trophy from Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall (pictured below left), at London’s medieval Guildhall. Milkman is narrated by a young woman dealing with an older man who uses family ties, social pressure and political loyalties as weapons of sexual coercion and harassment. It is set in the 1970s, but was published amid the global eruption of sexual misconduct allegations that sparked the #MeToo movement. “I think this novel will help people to think about MeToo, and I like novels that help people think about current movements and challenges,” said philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who chaired the judging panel. “But we think it’ll last – it’s not just about something that’s going on in this moment. I think it’s a very powerful novel about the damage and danger of rumour.” Burns beat five others, including a couple of favourites: American writer Richard Powers’ tree-centric, eco-epic The Overstory and Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan’s Washington

Black, the story of a slave who escapes from a sugar plantation in a hot-air balloon.