'It’s nice to feel I’m solvent. That’s a huge gift': Anna Burns on her life-changing Booker win

The author was in terrible pain and couldn’t afford to feed herself when she wrote her novel Milkman. She talks about growing up during the Troubles – and her ‘dreamlike’ success

Winning the Man Booker prize is clearly a life-changing event, but never more so than in the case of Tuesday night’s surprise success, Anna Burns, who became the first Northern Irish writer to win the £50,000 award for her third novel, Milkman. Go back four years and Burns was unable to write for excruciating back pain, living peripatetically around England, house-sitting when possible, struggling to make ends meet and using food banks (which she thanks in the acknowledgments of the book). When she was finally able to send the manuscript to her agent, it was turned down by several publishers. What an end to the story.

“I was thinking that when I got back to the hotel last night,” the 56-year-old author says when we meet. In good Booker tradition, she has only had a couple of hours’ sleep. “When I look back to 2014 – with this horrendous pain, wondering: ‘Will I even finish Milkman?’ And then Booker winner? The extremes … It feels wonderful, it feels dreamlike. Did that really happen?”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2QXjyUr

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