Anna Burns | |
|---|---|
 Anna Burns in 2020 | |
| Born | (1962-03-07)7 March 1962 (age 63) Belfast,Northern Ireland |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Education | St. Gemma's High School |
| Notable awards | Booker Prize 2018 International Dublin Literary Award 2020 |
Anna BurnsFRSL (born 7 March 1962) is an author fromNorthern Ireland. Her novelMilkman won the 2018Booker Prize, the 2019Orwell Prize for political fiction, and the 2020International Dublin Literary Award.[1]
She was born inBelfast and raised in the working-classCatholic district ofArdoyne. She attendedSt. Gemma's High School. In 1987, she moved toLondon. As of 2014, she lives inEast Sussex, on the south English coast.[2][3]
Her first novel,No Bones, is an account of a girl's life growing up in Belfast duringthe Troubles. The dysfunctional family in the novel symbolizes the Northern Ireland political situation.[4]No Bones won the 2001Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize presented by theRoyal Society of Literature for the best regional novel of the year in theUnited Kingdom andIreland. Among the novels that depict the Troubles within theLiterature of Northern Ireland,No Bones is considered an important work and has been compared toDubliners byJames Joyce for capturing theBelfast population's everyday language.[5]
Her second novel,Little Constructions, was published in 2007 by Fourth Estate (an imprint ofHarperCollins). It is a darkly comic and ironic tale centred on a woman from a tightly-knit family of criminals on a mission of retribution.[6]
In 2018, Burns won theBooker Prize for her third novelMilkman, making her the first Northern Irish writer to win the award.[7] After the ceremony,Graywolf Press announced that it would publishMilkman in the U.S. on 11 December 2018.[7]Milkman is set duringthe Troubles military conflict in the 1970s, in which the narrator is an unnamed 18-year-old girl known as "middle sister" who is stalked by an older paramilitary figure, Milkman.[8]
In 2021, she was elected aFellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL).[9]
