“I
love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than
them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too. “
– Anne Enright
Born in Ireland on
this date in 1962, Enright says she grew up enjoying writing but didn’t start
writing in earnest until the age of 21 when her family gave her an electric
typewriter for her birthday. She started
as a television writer, producing both adult and children’s programming while
at the same time doing a series of short stories, published in 1991 as the
award-winning collection The Portable
Virgin.
Since then, her
writing has won numerous awards including the Man Booker Prize for her 2007
novel The Gathering, which also won
the Irish Novel of the Year Award in 2008.
Widely praised for her
characterizations, particularly of women, she noted, “I
think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My
characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.”
Enright's works
have regularly appeared The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the
Irish Times. Once a regular
contributor to BBC Radio 4, she now reviews for The Guardian,
is a frequent lecturer, and just completed a term as the inaugural Laureate of
Irish Fiction.
Her advice to writers is to bring in
all aspects of a character’s life. “There's
no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life
that is not abnormal,” she said. “We all
have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives.”
Share A Writer’s
Moment with a friend by clicking the g+1 button below
No comments:
Post a Comment