Latest news with #AnneEnright
Irish Times
23-05-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Moving to Ireland helped me understand my mother, her peculiarities and weird secrecy
A printed out, yellowing piece of paper sits on our fridge. Occasionally, an over-enthusiastic yank of the door will send its curled-up edges flying to the ground. The dried-out blob holding it to the door is now doing only a bad impression of a piece of Blu Tack. On it is an Anne Enright quote: 'I am sorry. I cannot invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.' Other Irish immigrant households across the globe might choose more sentimental nods to the old country. A tasteful Celtic cross here. A 'Céad Míle Fáilte' plaque there. Maybe a cushion embroidered with that blessing about roads rising up and the winds being at your back. But we have the Anne Enright quote, which I've yet to see on a fridge magnet being sold at Carrolls Irish Gifts. When not quoting the Booker prizewinner and former Irish Laureate, my mother likes to cite one of the other great minds of our times, Ozzy Osbourne . Particularly that one scene from his noughties reality TV show when, on the matter of his family, the Prince of Darkness says 'I've said it before and I'll say it again. I love 'em all, but they're all f***ing mad!' Family life was never meant to be smooth. Growing up, there was acceptance of cousins and uncles and nieces breezing in and out of the doors, helping themselves to the contents of cupboards while telling you that you need to get the walls repainted. READ MORE Acceptance of family gatherings so big, one person ends up with a lattice-crossed behind from sitting on the only seat left - a stolen milkcrate. Of this person not talking to this one due to a dispute over a box trailer. Of trying to keep a mental track of what you can and can't bring up in front of who. Talks of people doing well, and people doing it hard. The ask of a lend. The offer of help. The begrudging assistance that comes after rolled eyes. The years' worth of petty disagreements and submerged jealousy ending in an instant when a crisis happens. There are Australian families like this too, but it seems to be more of a common Irish experience, like bouncy-castle Holy Communions – this messy comfort of a shared life. I had assumed all families were the same. Then I started dating other people, which gave me a thrilling but shocking peephole into how others managed their relatives. 'I'm just saying I would be a poorer person with less entertaining dinner-party stories if I didn't have slightly mad uncles with alarming and impressive access to fireworks' I didn't know that you could just never see your cousins. Not because of any great falling out, but rather that it's just not something you do any more. Like the forgotten Peloton in the attic. 'We don't have that much in common,' they explained with a shrug. As if that was a reasonable explanation. As if I hadn't spent several enjoyable Christmases chatting to a relative who believes the pyramids were built by aliens while wearing paper hats from the crackers. Families are not about having things in common (besides DNA and marriage). They're the random assemblage of kooks that fate and nature has given to you to enjoy and abide. I'm not talking about cases of abuse or serious harm. Then people need to do what they have to in order to heal, including cutting off family. I'm just saying I would be a poorer person with fewer entertaining dinner-party stories if I didn't have slightly mad uncles with alarming and impressive access to fireworks. Moving to Ireland helped me understand my mum. I thought her peculiarities were personal, not cultural. Being interested in the neighbours, being weirdly secretive about things no one cares about and having a hard time dealing with feelings. We were recently watching Marian Keyes in Sydney explain the nuanced difference between an amadán and eejit. 'My mother called us both,' she said. Which made me nudge my own, sitting next to me, who giggled. [ Brianna Parkins: I fantasise about moving back in with my parents Opens in new window ] Mum had used both words so interchangeably to describe us growing up that the neighbours thought they were our names in Irish. As her parents had done to her. 'It's not as harsh as an idiot, it's a nicer way of calling out the foolishness,' she said in defence. That was after the lady across the road asked if 'gobshite' would be a lovely name for a baby girl. Love in Irish families is more of a doing word than a saying one. I could win a Pulitzer Prize and be met with 'and is that the dress you're wearing?' by mam. But she'd get up at 4am to pick me up from the airport and have a cake baked on the table for me when I got back from the ceremony. Then she'd have all the relatives over to tell them how proud she is – as we all fought to sit on the good chairs.
Washington Post
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Sigrid Nunez and Anne Enright are among the winners of a $175,000 literary prize
NEW YORK — National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez and Booker Prize winner Anne Enright are among eight recipients of literary honors that include a $175,000 cash award. The Windham-Campbell Prizes are given each year for literary achievement and to enable writers to work independently. Other winners announced Tuesday include legal scholar Patricia Williams, dramatists Roy Williams and Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini, poets Anthony V. Capildeo and Tongo Eisen-Martin and essayist Rana Dasgupta.
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Novelist Anne Enright wins an $175k Windham-Campbell prize
The Irish novelist Anne Enright is one of eight writers set to receive $175,000 (£135,000) each in recognition of their life's work. American writer Sigrid Nunez was also selected as part of this year's Windham-Campbell prizes, which each year award $1.4m to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, with the aim of allowing writers to focus on their work independent of financial concerns. 'The sense of unreality has not left me since the news came in – what an astonishing thing to drop out of a clear blue sky,' said Enright, the author of three short story collections and eight novels including the Booker-winning The Gathering and, most recently, The Wren, The Wren. 'In her wide-ranging and wryly unsentimental fiction, Anne Enright explores the limitations and joys of our human need for belonging,' said this year's selection committee, which remains anonymous. Fellow fiction category winner Nunez, whose novels include The Vulnerables and The Friend, said that she was 'giddy with joy' on finding out she had won. Nunez 'can make us care about anything', wrote Sam Byers in a Guardian review of The Vulnerables. 'The concerns of the moment are rendered not as clumsy drama, but as living subjects of conversation; sites of intimacy and disagreement.' British playwright Roy Williams was recognised in the drama category, describing the award as an 'unexpected delight'. His plays include the Death of England series, co-written with Clint Dyer, and The Lonely Londoners. Williams's 'nuanced, multivocal portrayals of race and class lay bare uncomfortable truths about British identity, creating an essential and complex theatre of contemporary life', said the selection committee. A second UK-based playwright, Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini, was also chosen for drama. 'I am over the moon and currently hurtling through space somewhere near Jupiter,' they said. Their 2023 play Sleepova, about a sleepover between four friends, won the Olivier award for outstanding achievement in affiliate theatre. '[Ibini's] exuberant plays barrel on to the stage with joyful abandon, loosening the knots in the fabric of our socio-political lives with forensic attention to reveal new, hopeful ways of remaking the world,' said the judges. Trinidadian Scottish poet Anthony V Capildeo said that winning one of this year's poetry prizes 'lifted weights that I didn't even know were oppressing me internally'. Their 2016 collection, Measures of Expatriation, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and won the Forward prize. American poet Tongo Eisen-Martin was named as the second poetry recipient this year. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion British novelist and essayist Rana Dasgupta was selected in the nonfiction category, for work including his 2014 book Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Delhi. American legal scholar Patricia J Williams, who was also named as a nonfiction winner, said that she was 'literally floating' upon finding out she'd been given a prize. Her most recent book, The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law, explores bioethics, critical race theory and the US supreme court. The prizes are administered by Yale University's Beinecke rare book and manuscript library, and awarded to writers living in any part of the world and writing in English. The prizes were first given in 2013. Past recipients include Olivia Laing, Tessa Hadley, Edmund de Waal, Hanif Abdurraqib, Percival Everett, Teju Cole and Pankaj Mishra.
