Booker, Danno

It’s far from crime fiction Anne Enright (right) was reared, but it’d be entirely remiss of us not to mention the fact that her fourth novel, THE GATHERING, scooped the Man Booker prize last night. Quoth the Irish Times:

In what the judges said was a tight decision, Enright’s “powerful, uncomfortable and even at times angry book” saw off the competition from highly fancied works by Ian McEwan and New Zealander Lloyd Jones … Chairman of the panel of judges Howard Davies said it had been a very close decision but at the end the judges came to have enormous respect for her “emotionally-charged novel of family life” and came to “appreciate its careful structure and character development”. McEwan’s ON CHESIL BEACH and Jones’s MISTER PIP had been joint favourites to secure the €72,000 (£50,000) prize.

Fabulous stuff. The last Irish Booker prize winner, John Banville in 2005, immediately turned to crime fiction, penning CHRISTINE FALLS (the follow-up, THE SILVER SWAN, is due early next month). Can we expect Enright to follow suit? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …