New Delhi: Author Anna Burns was named the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman at a lavish awards ceremony in London on Tuesday night, becoming the first author from Northern Ireland to win the most prestigious English-language literary award.
Burns, 56, who was born in Belfast, is the 17th woman to bag the award in its 49-year history and the first woman since 2013. It was her third novel.
Set in an unnamed city, ‘Milkman’ is a coming of age story of a young woman’s affair with a married man set in the political troubles of Northern Ireland. It focuses on a “middle sister” as she navigates her way through rumour, social pressures and politics in a tight-knit community. Burns shows the dangerous and complex impact on a woman coming of age in a city at war.
In a review for the Guardian, Claire Kilroy stressed on Burns’ emphasis of “the oppressiveness of tribalism, of conformism, of religion, of patriarchy, of living with widespread distrust and permanent fear” and lauded the narrator’s voice as “original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique.”
“None of us has ever read anything like this before. Anna Burns’ utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose,” said Kwame Anthony Appiah, the chair of the 2018 judging panel.
“It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour. Set in a society divided against itself, ‘Milkman’ explores the insidious forms oppression can take in everyday life,” he said.
Unusually, in the book, the characters have designations rather than names. In an interview for the Man Booker Prize website, she said, “The book didn’t work with names. It lost power and atmosphere and turned into a lesser – or perhaps just a different – book. In the early days I tried out names a few times, but the book wouldn’t stand for it. The narrative would become heavy and lifeless and refuse to move on until I took them out again. Sometimes the book threw them out itself.”
The judges considered 171 submissions for this year’s prize. Burns, who lives in East Sussex in England, saw off competition from two British writers, two American writers and one Canadian writer.
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In addition to Milkman, the Booker Prize shortlist – two-thirds of which were written by women – included Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, which uses prose to follow a World War II veteran across the US in Hollywood’s postwar glory years, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, a work of narrative with an ecological message, The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, an steadfast account by a woman of poverty and mass incarceration, Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, an unusual story of colonial slavery and the burden of freedom, and Daisy Johnson who’s nomination for Everything Under, her debut novel about a complex mother-daughter relationship, made her the youngest nominee in the Man Booker Prize history.
Books shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Credit: ManBookerPrize/Twitter
Milkman is published by Faber & Faber, making it the fourth consecutive year the prize has been won by an independent publisher.
Burns’ win was announced by Kwame Anthony Appiah at a dinner at London’s Guildhall. She was presented with a trophy by Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, and a 50,000 pounds cheque by Luke Ellis, Chief Executive of Man Group. The recipient of the Man Booker Prize gets 52,500 pounds ($69,223 or Rs 50.85 lakh). The winning author also receives a designer bound edition of her book and a further 2,500 pounds for being short-listed.
“We are honoured to support the Man Booker Prize for the sixteenth year, as it continues in its fiftieth year to champion literary excellence and the power of the novel on a global scale,” Ellis said.
Appiah, a British-born Ghanaian-American novelist, was joined on the 2018 judging panel by crime writer Val McDermid; cultural critic Leo Robson; feminist writer and critic Jacqueline Rose; and artist and graphic novelist Leanne Shapton.
In 2017, George Saunders won the Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, making him the second American in a row to win the prize after the Man Booker Foundation decided to change the rules in 2014 to include for consideration of the prize, any novel written in English and published in Britain. The Man Booker Prize was previously limited to authors from Britain, Ireland, Zimbabwe and the Commonwealth. Northern Irish writer Anna Burns’ win will do well to assuage the fears of those within the literary community who fear the intrusion of an American hegemony in the Man Booker awards.
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Val McDermid, the best-selling crime writer and one member of the Man Booker judging panel, said, “The kind of people who read literary fiction do not ask authors for passports.”
(With inputs from PTI)