Anna Burns wins Man Booker Prize for ‘Milkman’

Man Booker Prize 2018: was awarded to Anna Burns, for ‘incredibly original’ “Milkman”, her timely, Troubles-set novel about a young woman being sexually harassed by a powerful man, a work set in a divided society which takes inspiration from the Northern Ireland of her childhood, received on Tuesday 16 October 2018 her trophy from Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, during a black-tie ceremony at London’s medieval Guildhall.

Anna Burns beats five other following finalists to win this award:

• American Writer Richard Powers’ tree-centric eco-epic The Overstory
• Canadian Novelist Esi E Edugyan’s Washington Black, the story of a slave who escapes from a sugar plantation in a hot-air balloon.
• American Novelist Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, set in a women’s prison;
• Scottish Poet Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, a verse novel about a traumatized D-Day veteran; and
• British Author 27-year-old Daisy Johnson’s Greek tragedy-inspired family saga Everything Under.

Anna Burns, 56, Belfast-born novelist is the first writer from Northern Ireland to win UK’s most important literary the prestigious £50,000 award, who has often struggled financially since 2002 Orange prize listing for her first novel, “No Bones”. Burns said that with her prize money, “I will clear my debts and live on what’s left.” Previous Irish winners, John Banville, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle, were from the republic. Burns is the first female winner since 2013, when Eleanor Catton took the award with The Luminaries.

Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland, officially named Ireland, which covers five-sixths of the island; and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdon.

Milkman, a vibrant, violent story about men, women, conflict and power set during Northern Ireland’s years of Catholic-Protestant violence. Burns said the germ of Milkman came to her in the image of a teenage girl walking down a street in a divided city while reading the novel Ivanhoe. Burns told reporters, “I just wait for my characters to come and tell me their stories, and I can’t write until they do”.

Milkman, the experimental novel, Burns’s third, is narrated by an unnamed 18-year-old girl, known as “middle sister”, who is being pursued by a much older paramilitary figure, the milkman, who uses family ties, social pressure and political loyalties as weapons of sexual coercion and harassment. Novel is set in the 1970s, but was published amid the global eruption of sexual misconduct allegations that sparked the #MeToo movement.

Booker’s chair of judges, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, announcing the win at a dinner at the Guildhall in London, said, it is “incredibly original”, “None of us has ever read anything like this before”, and added, “Anna Burns’s utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose. It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour.”

Man Booker Prize for Fiction, for the first time awarded 49 years ago in 1949, then known as the Booker–McConnell, is a literary prize awarded each year is for the best original novel written in English language and published in the UK. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured international renown and success; therefore, the prize is of great significance for the book trade.  From its inception, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African (and later Zimbabwean) citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, however, this eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change which proved controversial.

A high-profile literary award in British culture, the Booker Prize is greeted with great anticipation and fanfare. It is also a mark of distinction for authors to be selected for inclusion in the shortlist or even to be nominated for the “long-list”.