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Julian Barnes called the Booker Prize "bingo chic", but there is no doubt that the list of successful candidates for this year is a fast and furious race with some really fetish writers in the running. Many garland titles such as Sally Rooney's Normal People or Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure are midway between the selection and preselection lists, leaving a list of six shortlisted, which has been reduced to six. 170.
The Overstory by Richard Powers was the favorite for a while, although Daisy Johnson, 27, and her debut in the world, started betting late.
Yet among the six North Irish writers – and a regular outsider in bookmaker ratings – Anna Burns won the £ 50,000 prize and, it must be believed, the literary world at her feet.
It's his third novel, Milkman, which saw Booker's judges – including writers Jacqueline Rose and Val McDermid – award Burns a very surprised prize. Indeed, the writer seemed short of words as she accepted the Duchess of Cornwall's trophy at a brilliant ceremony in London earlier this week.
The jury unanimously concluded that Burns' imaginative and clever novel, which had taken place during the Troubles and told the story of an unnamed unnamed woman who was being pursued by a paramilitary shadow, was the deserving winner.
The novel was hailed not only for its astute winking at #MeToo, but also for its experimental, often stimulating writing style.
Some experts were as surprised as the author herself. "It's not since New Zealander Keri Hulme received this call in 1985 because Booker's jury delivered a more powerful bomb," The Guardian reported earlier this week. "It's a judiciously provocative choice, which was waiting to be made, while the publishing industry is looking for the soul of its next generation."
Milkman manufactures Burns – who was selected for the prestigious Orange Prize in 2002 for her first novel, No Bones – the first woman to win the Booker Prize since 2013.
That year, Eleanor Catton, still 20 years old, won the award for The Luminaries.
Burns (56) now joins a bright list of Irish Booker Award winners, including Roddy Doyle, John Banville and Anne Enright (and is the first Northern Irish winner of the award).
When asked by reporters what she would do with her prize, Burns, who was born in Belfast and now lives in Sussex, said, "I'm going to clear my debts and live off what's left."
This not only testifies to the book, but also to the lasting influence of the Booker Prize itself, which states that less than 24 hours after the announcement of Burns' victory, Milkman has become the number one ranking Amazon best sellers. And among the six preselected titles, Milkman, despite his experimental trend, has become one of the books that has seen a surge in sales even before the winner is announced.
When the shortlist was announced in September, Milkman sold 4,019 copies in Ireland, unlike its closest rival, Daisy Johnson, whose first novel, Everything Under, is sold 2,467 copies in the last four weeks (according to figures from Nielsen Book Scan).
Milkman has outperformed the rest of the combined shortlist in Ireland in recent weeks and is the most popular title in the UK and Irish combined, with total sales of 6,442 since mid-September.
According to the Booker Prize Foundation, an author can expect international recognition and a dramatic increase in book sales by winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
In the week following the announcement of the winners in 2017, Lincoln's Bardo sales by US author George Saunders increased by 1,227 pc.
Burns may seem like an overnight success for the occasional disciple of the book industry, but the truth is that the writer has already worked a lot over the years.
Born in Belfast and raised in the working-class district of Ardoyne, she moved to Notting Hill in London in 1997 to go to university and published her first novel, No Bones, in 2001.
In her childhood, she was a voracious reader and became a kind of prodigious young writer: "When I was a kid, I would be stuck in Enid Blytons, Agatha Christies, Russian fairy tales … one day, I'm going to be a kid. I thought, hang on, I'm going to write a book, so, whatever my age, I started writing this book that I had considered as a school book, I mean a book in a fictitious boarding school ", was she said recently.
In the mid-thirties, the writing "began suddenly, hastily … I felt that something would happen before that, and that it was going to be a beautiful thing to do or to be for me. or have. "
No Bones, too, was created in the midst of unrest in Northern Ireland and Burns was very much inspired by his memories of his youth in Ardoyne.
Burns wrote about past experiences, "I grew up in a place rife with violence, mistrust and paranoia, and populated with individuals trying to navigate and survive in this world of better than they could. "
Whatever his inspiration, it certainly worked from the start. In 2001, she won the Winfred Holtby Memorial Prize, awarded to No Bones for the best regional novel.
A year later, she was selected for the Orange 2002 award for her first novel. Little Constructions, a news published in 2007 and Mostly Hero in 2014, are also among the leading works.
In an attempt to keep the wolf out of the door, Burns would also have worked in commercial events.
For the moment, she plans to return to the book that she started after Little Constructions; an anonymous title on which she spent most years between 2006 and 2009 working.
About her writing style, she said: "A creative writing teacher gave a lecture once when I started writing, and told her audience of aspiring writers that There are writers who trace all the details before putting pen to paper are writers who do not know what happens at the end of a sentence.
"If you are the first," he says, "be prepared to change things, to open up, to adjust your plot, if you are the last (like me), he suggested to take stock from time to time on your work to see what you have and to achieve what your writing is saying or trying to tell you, and where it is going. "
Milkman by Anna Burns is available at Faber & Faber Books
What critics said:
- Claire Kilroy, of the Guardian, said, "Milkman's narrator upsets the status quo … because she's original, funny, oblique and unique.
- Catherine Toal of the Irish Times said: "Milkman must be recognized as a book that sounds the soul of the people".
- Tanya Sweeney in the Irish Independent: "This is a nifty account of the social landscape of Northern Ireland, but also a narrative of the arrival at adulthood with touches of black humor and an overwhelming portrait of rape culture. "
Irish independent
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