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London (dpa) - Irish author Anne Enright took the Man Booker Prize for Fiction late Tuesday for her novel, The Gathering, which chronicles a dysfunctional family's return home for a brother's funeral.

    "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," chairman of the judging panel Howard Davies said.

    Twisted sexuality and repression, alcoholism, family secrets, immigration, bad relationships and food all feature in the novel which leaves no cliche of Irish life unturned.

    "When people pick up a book they may want something happy that will cheer them up. In that case, they shouldn't really pick up my book," Enright said. "It is the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie."
   The novel had been on shortlist of favourites, but was still considered an outsider on a list that included On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Animal's People by Indra Sinha and Darkmans by Nicola Barker. dpa 


 
PROFILE: Anne Enright's acerbic vision enlivens Irish family theme Eds: Companion piece to eca246; epa photo available

    Dublin (dpa) - Anne Enright's biting prose and vivid imagery bring an acerbic freshness to the perennial Irish themes of family dysfunction, alcoholism and child abuse, and her style Tuesday won her the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

    Born in Dublin in 1962, Enright has a peculiarly modern vision, which although firmly anchored in the traditions of the modern Irish novel cannot be accused of sentimentality.

    "I saw a man with tertiary syphilis at Mass, once," is how the narrator, Veronica Hegarty, opens one chapter of The Gathering, and it sums up Enright's take on Irishness neatly.

    All the modern Irish themes are there in The Gathering, which features the members of a large family returning home to Dublin for the funeral after their brother's suicide.

    Twisted sexuality and repression, alcoholism, family secrets, immigration, bad relationships and food all feature in the novel which leaves no cliche of Irish life unturned.

    What distinguishes Enright's work however is her inventive and vivid use of language and imagery, with wit and humour enlivening every page.

    Enright's writings have appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Granta, and were collected in The Portable Virgin, her 1991 work that won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

    She currently contributes to the London Review of Books.

    Novels include The Wig My Father Wore (1995); What Are You Like? (2000), which won the Royal Society of Authors Encore Prize; The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) and The Gathering (2007).

    Her work also includes a book of essays, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004).

    Readers need not fear however that Enright is soft on the subject of children.

    These are the thoughts about her children of the Gathering's Veronica:
   "Are they good children? In the main. Though Emily is a bit of a cat and cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat."
   Enright lives in Wicklow, south of Dublin.