Forty-five-year-old novelist Anne Enright yesterday won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering (Jonathan Cape). Enright lives in Dublin, where she was born, and is the second Irish woman, after Iris Murdoch in 1978, to have won the prize. She received £50,000 (approximately $102,048). The annual prize, sponsored by the Man Group, is given for the best novel of the year by a citizen of the British Commonwealth, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The judges were Wendy Cope, Howard Davies, Giles Foden, Ruth Scurr, and Imogen Stubbs.
Howard Davies called The Gathering, which chronicles a woman’s discovery and confrontation of family secrets after returning home with her dead brother’s body, "an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language." Though On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones were considered this year’s favorites, Tom Adair of the Scotsman said that Enright’s novel was "a choice with which all the judges were happy."
