Anna Burns, 56, became the first Northern Irish author to win the Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman.
Burns, who seemed lost for words, said she was “stunned” after accepting her trophy from the Duchess of Cornwall. Her book Milkman is an experimental novel about an 18 year old girl who is harassed by a paramilitary figure during the troubling times in Northern Ireland.
When asked what she would do with the money, Burns told the Guardian, “I’ll clear my debts and live on what’s left.”
The judges emphasized the “distinctive and consistently realized voice of the funny, resilient, astute, plain-spoken, first-person protagonist” and called the novel “marvelous”. Chair of the judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah remarked to the BBC, “One of the wonderful things about [Milkman] is the texture of the language.It's written in this amazing voice of this woman who is living in a divided society. She's being harassed by a man who is sexually interested in her, and he's taking advantage of divisions in the society to use the power he has, because of those divisions, to go after her."
The other books in the shortlist were The Long Take by Robin Robertson, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, who at 27 was the youngest nominee for the prize.
The Booker Prize is the UK’s leading literary award and has been awarded since 1969 to the best original fiction written in the English language and published in the UK. Past winners have included VS Naipaul, John Berger, William Golding, Salman Rushdie, Kingsley Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, and George Saunders among others.