Events at the Shop
Anne Enright - Taking Pictures
Thursday 6 March 2008
Anne Enright won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for her novel The Gathering and commanded a full house at the London Review Bookshop on the day of publication of Taking Pictures. After confessing to her audience, “I can’t tell you how relieved I am not to be reading about suicide”, Anne gave a lively and engaging performance of two stories from the new collection, before answering questions from the audience.
Honey
Listen now (21:36)
Enright reads ‘Honey’, which won the Davy Byrne’s Irish Writing Award (and 20,000 euro) in 2004 – a competition, she confessed, that she nearly didn’t enter “until I thought what my mother would say, if I didn’t even try for twenty grand”.
Until the Girl Died
Listen now (19:58)
Enright notes wryly that the similarities between the two stories she has chosen have granted “an insight I didn’t really need into my own work: ‘So, your work is all about death and infidelity.’ They’re not all that story!”
Audience Questions
Listen now (14:44)
After her reading, Enright answered audience questions on, inter alia:
- The urge to re-edit one’s own work
- The role of the body in her work
- How the changes in Ireland had affected her writing and that of others
Recorded and edited by Adrian Leibowitz and Brett Wilson
Common Custom:documentary & archive
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. After studying creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia, she worked for six years as a TV producer and director in Ireland. She has published one previous collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and four novels: The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch and The Gathering. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was also published in 2004.
Further Reading
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Slavoj Žižek - Violence