Belfast-born author becomes first Northern Irish writer to win the Man Booker Prize
● 56-year-old draws on her own experiences of the Troubles
A Belfast-born author has won Britain’s most prestigious literary award with a novel about a teenage girl being stalked by a middle-aged paramilitary.
Anna Burns has become the first author from Northern Ireland and the 17th female writer to win the Man Booker Prize.
The 56-year-old, who drew on her own experiences of the “Troubles” to write Milkman, was one of four female contenders for the award.
The six-strong shortlist included the youngest ever author, 27-year-old Daisy Johnson, and the Scottish poet, Robin Robertson, the first writer to have a “novel in verse” in contention.
Set in an unnamed city, Milkman is said to explore the dense atmosphere of suspicion, self-censorship, sexual policing, danger and betrayal of life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.”
Kwame Anthony Appia, chair of the judging panel, which included the scottish crime writer Val Mcdermid, said: “None of us has ever read anything like this before.
“Anna Burns’ utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose.
“It is a story of brutality, sexual
0 Anna Burns receives the Man Booker Prize from the Duchess of Cornwall
encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour. Set in a society divided against itself, Milkman explores the insidious forms oppression can take in everyday life.’
Discussing the book previously, Burns said: “I grew up in a place that was rife with violence, distrust and paranoia, and peopled by individuals trying to navigate and survive in that world as best as they could.”
Asked why she decided not to name either the city in the
book or the main protagonist of Milkman, Burns said: “The book didn’t work with names. It lost power and atmosphere and turned into a lesser - or perhaps just a different - book.
“In the early days I tried out names a few times, but the book wouldn’t stand for it.
“The narrative would become heavy and lifeless and refuse to move on until I took them out again.
“Sometimes the book threw them out itself.”
● The Long Take, by Robin Robertson: Walker is a D-day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair after the Second World War.
● Milkman, by Anna Burns: In a unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, rumours start to swell.
● Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan: When two English brothers take the helm of a Barbados sugar plantation, Washington Black – an 11-year-old field slave – finds himself selected as personal servant to one of them.
● Everything Under, by Daisy Johnson: As a child, Gretel lived on a canal boat with her mother and they invented a language of their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of 16 and now works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries. A phone call from a hospital throws up questions from long ago.
● The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner: Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Outside is the world from which she has been permanently severed: the San Francisco of her youth, the strip club where she once gave lap dances for a living and a seven-year-old son, who is now in the care of her estranged mother.
● The Overstory, by Richard Powers: Nine strangers, each in different ways, become summoned by trees, brought together in a last stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.