Anna Burns

Burns was raised one of seven children in Catholic Ardoyne, north Belfast, at the height of the Troubles, and left for London in 1987. Her debut No Bones (2001) told the conflict through a Belfast girlhood and won the Winifred Holtby Prize.

Milkman (2018) was written through years of chronic back pain and real poverty: her Booker acceptance thanked food banks and charities by name. Its narrator, 'middle sister,' reads nineteenth-century novels while walking and is marked as 'beyond-the-pale' just as an older paramilitary begins, deniably, to claim her; no person or place in the book is ever named.

Judges called it demanding; readers made it a bestseller anyway. There is nothing else quite like her sentence in contemporary fiction.