“It’s not that she’s below the radar,” wrote Eoin McNamee about author Anna Burns when he interviewed her for The Irish Times last month about her novel, Milkman. “It may be that when you’re talking about writing from Belfast, she is the radar, the finder of strange objects at a distance, the uncoverer of what moves unseen in the dark.”
Until she won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday, the Belfast author was very much under the radar, even among most booklovers here. Whereas Normal People by Sally Rooney and By A Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan, the two other Irish titles longlisted for the most prestigious English-language literary award, were both bestsellers, Burns’s book had barely bubbled under.
Although highly original, its absurdist black humour and trapped characters evoke Samuel Beckett. Its plot and setting – a young woman stalked by a predatory paramilitary in an Ardoyne traumatised by the Troubles – feel timely and urgent in the era of Brexit and #MeToo.
Now her publisher has printed 150,000 copies and Milkman is Amazon’s No 1 bestseller, so her royalties are likely to more than match her £50,000 prize. Burns’s success, however, only serves to highlight that most writers live on the breadline. Milkman’s acknowledgements include a food bank and a housing charity which helped her find a home.
Although this is the first Irish Man Booker triumph since Anne Enright won in 2007 for The Gathering, it is just the latest literary success in a sequence that includes back-to-back Wellcome Book Prizes for Suzanne O’Sullivan and Mark O’Connell; Eimear McBride and Lisa McInerney winning both the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize; Mike McCormack, Kevin Barry and Colum McCann winning the International Dublin Literary Award; Sebastian Barry becoming the first author to win the Costa Book of the Year twice; Sinéad Morrissey winning the Forward Poetry Prize; and Sarah Crossan and Louise O’Neill winning consecutive YA Book Prizes. It is a tradition that deserves to be celebrated, and supported.
