Enright Wins Booker
By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 10/16/2007 3:26:00 PM
In a major upset, Anne Enright has won England’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her Irish family saga, The Gathering. The book, published in paperback in the U.S. by Grove Atlantic under its Black Cat imprint, beat out the two favorites: Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones and On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan. It was published in the U.K. by Jonathan Cape.
With her victory Enright, who will win the $100,000 purse that comes with the honor, has thrown not only literary on-lookers but, also, the betting public. Bookmakers in the U.K.—where the prize is fodder for bookworms as well as old-fashioned gamblers—had pitted Jones and McEwan in a dead heat up until the announcement.
Enright's win also comes on the heels of some minor controversy surrounding the shortlist, namey the inclusion of McEwan’s 163-page work. Some in the U.K. were asking if the work was weighty enough for the honor, with detractors claiming the book was a novella and therefore should not have been considered. Ironically, McEwan’s sparse work shared space on this year’s shortlist with the longest novel ever nominated: Nicola Barker’s 840-page opus, Darkmans.
Beating out Mohsin Hamid and Indra Sinha--as well as Barker, Jones and McEwan--Enright was praised by the chair of the judging committee, Howard Davies, for crafting a "powerful, uncomfortable and, at times, angry" novel.
