Enright takes Booker Prize for Fiction

Irish author Anne Enright won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction tonight with her bleak family saga The Gathering.

Enright had been a rank outsider in a shortlist which included favourites Ian McEwan, with his novella On Chesil Beach, and New Zealander Lloyd Jones, with the highly fancied Mister Pip.

But the judges announced Enright’s novel as winner of the £50,000 literary award at a ceremony held in London’s Guildhall.

“Anne Enright has written a powerful, uncomfortable and, at times, angry book. The Gathering is an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language,” said chair of the judging panel Howard Davies.

“We think she is an impressive novelist, we expect to hear a lot more from her,” Davies said.

“The book is powerful, it pulls you along and it has an absolutely brilliant ending. It has one of the best last sentences of any novel I have ever read.”

Enright, 45, is a former TV producer who published her first book in 1995.

This is her fourth novel, a dark tale of family dysfunction.

When troubled alcoholic Liam Hegarty commits suicide by walking into the sea, his siblings gather in Dublin for his wake.

His sister, Veronica, the narrator of the book, trawls through their family history in a bid to make sense of his death and uncovers some difficult truths.

Enright said: “When people pick up a book they may want something happy that will cheer them up.

In that case, they shouldn’t really pick up my book… it is the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.”

Tonight’s win will increase the sales of a book which has hitherto had little attention – so far it has been the least popular of the six shortlisted books on Amazon.co.uk, accounting for just 7% of sales.

Davies said the book was “depressing” and “a little bleak” in places with some “pretty tough images”, but added: “I think people will find this a very readable novel.”

The judges spent two-and-a-half hours deliberating and used three separate voting methods in order to choose their winner.

Davies admitted it had been a “tight decision” but eventually unanimous.

“It was not everybody’s first choice, all the other books had their advocates of one sort of another, but it was a choice with which all the judges were happy,” he said.

Enright’s last book was Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood, published in 2004, a work of non-fiction which chronicled her own experiences of having a child.

This is the second Irish Booker win in two years – John Banville took the prize in 2005 for The Sea.

The other Irish winners are Iris Murdoch (1978) and Roddy Doyle (1993), making Enright the second Irishwoman ever to win.

The other five shortlisted books were On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Animal’s People by Indra Sinha and Darkmans by Nicola Barker.