Anne Enright

Anne Teresa Enright was born 11 October 1962 in Dublin, Ireland. She initially attended St. Louis High School in Rathmines before moving to Canada upon winning an international scholarship to study at the Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, where she studied for an International Baccalaureate. She then returned to Dublin to study English and Philosophy at Trinity College, and won another scholarship to complete a master’s in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. 

Enright initially worked as a television producer and director in RTÉ for six years, leaving to pursue writing full time in 1993 following a breakdown. Her first publication – a collection of short stories, The Portable Virgin (1991) – won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was followed by her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, in 1995. 

Despite winning the 2001 Encore Award for her second novel, What Are You Like (2001), and the 2004 Davy Byrne Irish Writing Award, Enright possessed a relatively low profile until 2007, when her reputation soared after she was awarded the Man Booker Prize for her fourth novel, The Gathering (2007). Since then, she has won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz (2011), the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year twice – in 2008 for The Gathering and 2016 for The Green Road – the 2016 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and the 2024 Writer’s Prize for Fiction for The Wren, The Wren. 

Enright has also been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010, presented with an Honorary Doctorate in Literature by Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2012, was appointed the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015-2018) by then Taoiseach Enda Kenny, received the Irish PEN Award for Literature in 2017 and became an elected member of Aosdána in 2021. Since 2018, she has continued to write while teaching Creative Writing as a lecturer in University College Dublin’s School of English, Drama and Film.