Anna Burns


Anna Burns is an author from Northern Ireland. Her novel Milkman won the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

Biography

She was born in Belfast and raised in the working-class Catholic district of Ardoyne. She attended St. Gemma's High School. In 1987, she moved to London. As of 2014, she lives in East Sussex, on the south English coast.

Work

Her first novel, No Bones, is an account of a girl's life growing up in Belfast during the Troubles. The dysfunctional family in the novel symbolizes the Northern Ireland political situation. No Bones won the 2001 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize presented by the Royal Society of Literature for the best regional novel of the year in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Among the novels that depict the Troubles within the Literature of Northern Ireland, No Bones is considered an important work and has been compared to Dubliners by James Joyce for capturing the Belfast population's everyday language.
Her second novel, Little Constructions, was published in 2007 by Fourth Estate. It is a darkly comic and ironic tale centered on a woman from a tightly-knit family of criminals on a mission of retribution.
In 2018, Burns won the Man Booker Prize for her third novel Milkman, making her the first Northern Irish writer to win the award. After the ceremony, Graywolf Press announced that it would publish "Milkman" in the U.S. on 11 December 2018. Milkman is an experimental novel set during The Troubles military conflict in the 1970s, in which the narrator is an unnamed 18-year-old girl known as "middle sister" who is stalked by an older paramilitary figure, Milkman.

Novels