Novelist Anne Enright awarded prestigious $175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize
Ms Enright is the eighth Irish writer to win one of the prizes. Picture: Moya Nolan
Novelist Anne Enright has been awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize, which carries a $175,000 prize per recipient.
Each year, the Windham-Campbell Prizes award a total of $1.4m to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama.
In selecting Ms Enright for one of this year's awards, the prize's selection committee, which are anonymous, said the Dubliner's "formidable body of work" has explored the theme of the family "in ways that feel nothing short of momentous".
"Her domestic portraits are startlingly potent in that they contain within them all the most pressing issues of our time—from suicide to changing sexual norms and environmental collapse," the judges said.
Anne Enright was awarded the Man Booker Prize for her 2007 novel, The Gathering, a work the Windham-Campbell judges said displayed "the majestic heights of her prose in depictions of intergenerational wounds and reparations".
"As a writer, Enright has always refused categorization leading to an inventive prose all her own," the judging panel added.
"With her iconoclastic daring, Enright is skillfully able to wield shifts in narrative styles, viewpoints, and time to echo the true-to-life nature of consciousness and memory."
Reacting to her win, Ms Enright said she was "floored" to be awarded the prestigious prize.
"The sense of unreality has not left me since the news came in—what an astonishing thing to drop out of a clear blue sky," she said.
"I am floored by the Windham-Campbell Prize’s generosity and goodwill."
Established at Yale University in 2011, the first Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes were presented in 2013.
According to its website, mission of the awards is to "call attention to literary achievement and provide writers the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns."
Ms Enright is the eighth Irish writer to win one of the prizes.
