UWC graduate, Anne Enright (Pearson College), has been awarded the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her novel, The Gathering. 

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, also known in short as the Booker Prize, is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of either the British Commonwealth of Nations or the Republic of Ireland.

Howard Davies, Chair of the Judges has said:

‘The Gathering is an unflinching look at a grieving family. It’s the bleakness of one woman’s vision, a bleakness rooted in her family, her marriage and the death of her brother.’

Speaking on the UK’s Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme Anne said: ‘when people pick up a book they may want something that will cheer them up, in that case they shouldn’t really pick up my book… my book is the equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.’

Anne was born in Dublin where she continues to live and work. She is the author of three previous novels: The Wig My Father Wore (1995), What Are You Like? (2000) and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002). Reviewers have called her winning book ‘distinctive’ in its ‘exhilarating bleakness’.

Offical Booker Prize Website

Editorial from Manini Chatterjee, classmate and writer for The Telegraph, India