Successfully reading a ‘prize-winning’ novel means that we need to hear its own voice, isolate it from the acclaim of the press, and interact with it on its own terms.

The worth of the text, savoured by pre-prize patrons, can be displaced by its new-found public honour. Burns is the first Briton to win the prize since the change.The acquisition of a major literary award can lead to a novel’s death by glib appreciations and burial by half-hearted comparisons. Launched in 1969, the Man Booker Prize was only open to novelists from Commonwealth states until 2014, when all restrictions were removed. Other shortlisted works included The Overstory by American author Richard Powers and Washington Black by Canadian writer Esi Edugyan. The novel was one of six in the running for the 50,000-pound (€57,000, $66,000) prize. She is the author of two previous novels, No Bones and Little Constructions, and the novella Mostly Hero. The 56-year-old said the idea of Milkman came to her in the image of a teenage girl walking down a street in a divided city while reading Ivanhoe, a British historical novel set in the 12th century.īurns said she was 'stunned' at receiving the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award, having heard that the judges decision was unanimous. Set in the 1970s, the novel was published amid the global eruption of sexual misconduct allegations sparked by the #Metoo movement.

Milkman follows a bookish 18-year-old woman who is pressurized by an older, more powerful man who uses family ties, social pressure and political loyalties as weapons of sexual coercion and harassment. The character is also tormented by the vicious tongues of her neighbors. ' None of us has ever read anything like this before,' Kwame Anthony Appiah, chair of the 2018 judges, said as he announced Burns' name.īorn in Belfast in 1962, Burns grew up in a deeply divided region at the height of the sectarian conflict. She left for university in England and has remained there ever since. The story, which judges honored as 'utterly distinctive,' explores the 30 years of Catholic-Protestant violence in Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1998, known as 'The Troubles.' Northern Irish author Anna Burns on Tuesday became the first writer from her country to win Britain's esteemed Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman.

Anna burns books