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For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Anne Enright''s career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen-eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: she interprets Sophocles'' Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway, writes on Ireland''s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights, and offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter. Attention brings Anne Enright''s wide-ranging cultural criticism, literary and autobiographical writing together for the first time. Explorations of the intersection between the personal and political, the subtleties of bodily autonomy, complex family dynamics and the challenges of intimacy preoccupy Anne Enright''s award-winning and critically acclaimed fiction. Here we see Enright grappling with and answering these questions in her non-fiction. It is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.
About the author
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and eight novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Other award include the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz, the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award and Novel of the Year (which she has won twice), the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature and the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction. Most recently she won the 2024 Writers' Prize for Fiction and the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.
