Attention

For thirty years Anne Enright—one of our greatest living novelists (Times)—has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and drawing us into her precise insights. These essays, collated from throughout Enright’s career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen–eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: she interprets Sophocles’s Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway; writes on Ireland’s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights; and offers new perspectives on writers such as Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner, and Angela Carter.

True to the themes that saturate her award–winning fiction, Attention explores the intersection between the personal and political, complex family dynamics, and the body in crystalline, urgent prose. This stunning collection unites Enright’s cultural criticism, literary, and autobiographical writing for the first time.

Author Biography

Anne Enright is the author of eight novels, most recently The Wren. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. In 2022, Enright was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She lives and works in Dublin.