Irish writer Anne Enright has won the Man Booker fiction prize for The Gathering, an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family that its author called the literary equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.Enright had been considered a long-shot to take Britain’s most prestigious, and contentious, literary trophy. The prize, which carries a check for USD 100,000 was awarded during a ceremony at London’s medieval Guildhall on Tuesday.She is the second Irish writer to win the prize in the past three years, after John Banville’s The Sea in 2005.The Gathering is a family epic set in England and Ireland, in which a brother’s suicide prompts 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty to probe her family’s troubled, tangled history.Enright said people looking for a cheery read should not pick up her book.“It is the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie,” she said.Howard Davies, the chairman of the judging panel, acknowledged the book was “a little bleak” in places, but praised it as “a very readable novel.” “Anne Enright has written a powerful, uncomfortable and, at times, angry book. The Gathering is an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language,” he said.Enright said the book’s focus on family was a classically Irish theme. “I think family is a hugely interesting place, it’s a place where stories happen. . And it’s also a central Irish institution,” said Enright, who admitted feeling a bit “trembly” when she heard she had won.
