Anne Enright

Anne Enright is an Irish writer known for her fiction exploring family, love, identity, and motherhood. She won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering.

Anne Teresa Enright was Born in Dublin. Enright attended St. Louis High School in Rathmines. She earned an international scholarship to Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, studying for two years. Anne then completed a BA in English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin.

A typewriter she received for her 21st birthday inspired Enright to write seriously. She won a Chevening Scholarship to the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course, studying under Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury, and completed an MA degree.

Enright worked as a television producer and director for RTÉ in Dublin for six years, producing the program Nighthawks for four years and working in children's programming for two years. She began writing full-time in 1993 after leaving television due to a breakdown. Reflecting on this period, she remarked, "I recommend it [...] having a breakdown early. If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again."

Her first published work was The Portable Virgin, a collection of short stories in 1991. Angela Carter, Enright's former creative writing teacher, praised it as "elegant, scrupulously poised, always intelligent and, not least, original."

Her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore (1995), explores themes such as love, motherhood, and the Catholic Church. Her second novel, What Are You Like? (2000), focuses on twin girls separated at birth and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Awards. Her third novel, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002), is a fictionalized account of the life of Eliza Lynch, consort of Paraguayan president Francisco Solano López.

In 2004, Enright published Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, a collection of essays about childbirth and motherhood. Her fourth novel, The Gathering (2007), won the Man Booker Prize. It tells the story of Veronica Hegarty, who gathers her siblings in Dublin for the wake of their brother, Liam.

Enright's subsequent novels continued to garner acclaim. The Forgotten Waltz (2011) won the Andre Carnegie Medal for Fiction. The Green Road (2015) was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and won the Irish Novel of the Year. Actress (2020) was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and details a daughter's account of her mother's rise to fame in Irish theatre and Hollywood.

Enright has also contributed essays to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and she writes for The Irish Times and The Guardian. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines.

From 2015 to 2018, Enright served as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, promoting engagement with Irish literature through public lectures and creative writing classes. She began teaching at UCD's School of English in the 2018–19 academic year.

Enright lives in Dublin with her husband, Martin Murphy, and their two children.