Milkman’s restless, funny, dark and densely packed prose has been compared to Samuel Beckett, though Burns says she only read the Irish Nobel laureate after finishing her novel. Set in a divided, unnamed city, the novel follows an 18-year-old girl who is being stalked by a sinister and much older man, known locally as “the milkman” (none of the characters are given names). Milkman (Faber & Faber ), like No Bones and her second novel Little Constructions (2007), draws on Burns’s childhood. In 1987 she moved to London, to study Russian, and a decade later she wrote her first novel, No Bones, a blackly comic, Belfast-set coming-of-age story that was shortlisted for the women’s Orange Prize in 2002. “Someone at my publishers said yesterday ‘Now that you’ve won the Booker Prize…’ and it really hit me for the first time,” she told me before we took the stage for a conversation at Foyles bookshop in central London.īurns, who is 56, was born in Belfast and raised in the predominantly Catholic district of Ardoyne, the location of some of the city’s worst violence during the Troubles. When we meet it is less than 48 hours since Anna Burns was announced as the surprise winner of the 50th Man Booker Prize, and she is adjusting to her new reality.
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