According to Appiah, the judges, picking from a shortlist that delved into some dark themes, were “unanimous” in their choice of winner – and not influenced by concerns that picking a third American winner in a row could cause controversy.īurns, who was born in Belfast and now lives in East Sussex, drew on her own experiences growing up in what she called “a place that was rife with violence, distrust and paranoia”.

It also makes her the first female winner since 2013, when Eleanor Catton took the award with The Luminaries.īurns beat writers including the American literary heavyweight Richard Powers, Daisy Johnson, at 27 the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the award, and the Canadian writer Esi Edugyan. The win makes Burns the first Northern Irish winner – previous Irish winners, including John Banville, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle, all come from the republic. What will she do with the money? “I’ll clear my debts and live on what’s left.” It’s a waiting process.” She “just had to wait for my characters to tell me their stories”.Īsked about how she had filled the long gap since her 2002 Orange prize listing for No Bones, she said she had done commercial events and moved houses.

At the press conference afterwards, the 56-year-old author said her job as a novelist was “to show up and be present and attend. Because of the flow of the language and the fact some of the language is unfamiliar, it is not a light read I think it is going to last.”Īs the award was announced, Burns was lost for words. And it is enormously rewarding if you persist with it. “I spend my time reading articles in the Journal of Philosophy so by my standards this is not too hard. It is definitely worth it because the view is terrific when you get to the top,” he said. Written with few paragraph breaks, eschewing character names for descriptions, Appiah admitted that Milkman could be seen as “challenging, but in the way a walk up Snowdon is challenging.

It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour.” “Anna Burns’s utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose. “None of us has ever read anything like this before,” said Appiah, announcing the win at a dinner at the Guildhall in London. It is “incredibly original”, according to the Booker’s chair of judges, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. The experimental novel, Burns’s third, is narrated by an unnamed 18-year-old girl, known as “middle sister”, who is being pursued by a much older paramilitary figure, the milkman.

Anna burns the milkman