Anna Burns offers a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.
By Anna Burns
The Man Booker Prize 2018
Anna Burns reacts to the announcement that she has won
A feel-good tale when Anna Burns, who relied on a housing charity and food banks for shelter and sustenance as she wrote, took the prize and watched Milkman deliver huge sales.
Burns became the first Northern Irish writer to win the prize when her third novel, a Troubles-era tale of sectarianism and sexual harassment, came out on top. With few paragraphs and characters without proper names, the chair of judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said the novel was ‘challenging, but in the way a walk up Snowdon is challenging’.
Burns won hearts at the award ceremony by being visibly overwhelmed. She would use the prize money, she said, to ‘clear my debts and live on what’s left’.
Winner The Booker Prize 2018
- By
- Anna Burns
- Published by
- Faber & Faber
Anna Burns offers a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.
The shortlist
Esi Edugyan relates the astonishing adventures of Washington Black, whose escape from the brutal cane plantations of Barbados was only the beginning.
By Esi Edugyan
Daisy Johnson’s debut novel turns classical myth on its head in an unsettling story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging.
Rachel Kushner combines a gritty portrait of life on the margins of contemporary America with a stinging indictment of the US penal system.
Richard Powers’ radical and remarkable novel. Nine strangers are each summoned in different ways by the natural world to save it from catastrophe.
Robin Robertson’s lyrical narrative follows a good man haunted by war and violence - yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.
The longlist
The 2018 judges
Judges for the 2018 prize discuss the longlist
Judges for the 2018 prize discuss the shortlist
Judges for the 2018 prize discuss the winner
The 2018 Man Booker Prize - winner event
