Anna Burns

Anna Burns is a Northern Irish novelist, the first author from Northern Ireland to win the Man Booker Prize. Born in Belfast during the height of the Troubles, she grew up in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast and draws heavily on this experience in her fiction. Milkman (2018) won the Man Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and the National Book Award for Translated Literature (as it was already in English). Set in an unnamed city during an unnamed conflict that closely resembles Belfast in the 1970s, the novel follows a young woman in a paramilitary-controlled community who is being pursued by an older man known only as 'the milkman.' The novel is narrated in an idiosyncratic, stream-of-consciousness voice that refuses to name people or places. Burns previously published two novels: No Bones (2001) and Little Constructions (2007). She struggled financially for many years and reportedly subsisted on food bank provisions while writing Milkman. Her Booker Prize win generated widespread attention to her earlier work and her financial circumstances. Burns lives in East Sussex, England. Her work is celebrated for its dark humor, its formal strangeness, and its unflinching depiction of life under sectarian violence and communal surveillance.