Anne Enright

Enright grew up in Dublin, took the creative writing MA at East Anglia under Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury, and then spent six years producing television at RTÉ until a breakdown ended one career and confirmed the other.

Story collections and early novels (The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?) built a connoisseur's reputation for sentence-level daring before The Gathering (2007) won the Booker: nine surviving Hegarty siblings converge on a wake, and Veronica invents, remembers, and refuses to remember what happened in their grandmother's house. The Forgotten Waltz, The Green Road, and Actress kept extending the family ledger.

In 2015 she became Ireland's first Laureate for Irish Fiction, her criticism as unsparing and funny as the novels.