Milkman wins the Man Booker 2018

Northern Irish author Anna Burns has won this year’s Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman, which goes into the past to tell a story that will resonate strongly with the present.

Described by judges of the prize’s panel as “experimental” and “incredibly original”, Milkman is set during the era of The Troubles — ethno-nationalist conflicts in Northern Ireland that began in the late 1960s and lasted till the end of the 20th century. Drawing heavily from her own experiences of growing up in a “place that was rife with violence, distrust and paranoia”, Burns tells of an 18-year-old unnamed narrator being pursued and sexually harassed by an older paramilitary figure,w against the backdrop of sectarian divides in Northern Ireland.

Announcing Burns’s win, the chairman of the judging panel, philosopher and novelist Kwame Anthony Appiah, said, “None of us has ever read anything like this before.” Written with few paragraph breaks and employing descriptions instead of names — the protagonist is known only as “the middle sister” — it is, according to Appiah, “enormously rewarding if you persist with it.”

Burns is the first Northern Irish writer to win the award and after a gap of five years, the first woman to do so. The last female winner of the prize was Eleanor Catton for her novel The Luminaries.

Other novels shortlisted for this year’s prize were The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, The Overstory by Richard Powers, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, The Long Take by Robin Robertson, and Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, who — at 27 years old — is the youngest writer to have ever been nominated for the prestigious literary award.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 21st, 2018