Anne Enright Wins Man Booker Prize

On Tuesday, October 16, Anne Enright was named the winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Gathering, published in the U.S. in September by Black Cat, a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic. The prize recognizes the best full-length novel written in English by a citizen of the Commonwealth or Ireland, as selected by a panel of judges including some of the country's best-known critics, writers, and academics.

Enright is the second Irish woman to win the prize and joins fellow compatriots, Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle, and John Banville who won the prize in 1978, 1993, and 2005, respectively.

The chairman of the judging panel, Howard Davies, said The Gathering provided "an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language."

The Gathering has won high praise in the U.S. In his Los Angeles Times review, Tim Rutten described Enright's book as "a wonderfully elegant and unsparing novel that takes the old Irish subjects of family dysfunction and the vagaries of memory into territory made fresh by an objectivity so precise it seems almost loving in its care."

"We have published all four books of Anne Enright's and we believe she is one of the great voices writing in the English language today," said Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic Inc. "We are honored to be her publisher here in the U.S. and we are thrilled to see her receive the recognition ... she has long deserved."

Enright was born in Dublin where she continues to live and work. She is the author of three previous novels: The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (all Grove/Atlantic).

This is the second year in a row that Grove/Atlantic has published the Booker winner (last year's winner was Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss). It is the first award for the paperback original imprint Black Cat.