Anne Enright was tonight (Tuesday 16th October) named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Gathering published by Jonathan Cape.

Anne Enright is the second Irish woman to win the prize, joining compatriots Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle and John Banville who won the prize in 1978, 1993 and 2005 respectively. The author recently said that her book was ‘a real weepie - the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood movie’.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin where she continues to live and work. She is the author of three previous novels: The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. Reviewers have called her winning book ‘distinctive’ in its ‘exhilarating bleakness’.

Chair of the judges, Howard Davies, made the announcement, which was broadcast live on the BBC Ten O’ Clock News, at the awards dinner at the Guildhall, London. Peter Clarke, Chief Executive of Man Group plc, presented Anne Enright with a cheque for £50,000.

Howard Davies commented,

’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.’

Over and above her prize of £50,000, Anne Enright is guaranteed a huge increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer-bound edition of their book.

The judging panel for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is: Howard Davies, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science; Wendy Cope, poet; Giles Foden, journalist and author; Ruth Scurr, biographer and critic, and Imogen Stubbs, actor and writer.The Winner

The Gathering is a family epic. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations – starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman – showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

Anne Enright, 45, was born on 11th October 1962 in Dublin, where she now lives and works. After studying creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia, she worked for six years as a TV producer and director in Ireland. She has published one collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and three previous novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. What Are You Like? was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and won the Encore Award. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was published in 2004.

The winner of the Man Booker Prize was chosen from 110 entries. 92 books were submitted and 18 books were called-in. The shortlist was made up of six books. The other shortlisted titles were Nicola Barker (Darkmans), Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), Lloyd Jones (Mister Pip), Ian McEwans (On Chesil Beach) and Indra Sinha (Animal’s People)

The longlist, the Man Booker Dozen, this year consisted of 13 books , the maximum number now prescribed by the revised rules of the prize

The Booker Prize for Fiction was first awarded in 1969, and Man Group plc was announced as the sponsor of the prize in April 2002, with a five year extension agreed in 2006. For a full history of the prize including previous winners, shortlisted authors and judges visit the website: www.themanbookerprize.com. The site features the rules of entry, background information and breaking news and is the quickest way for the prize’s worldwide audience to access information.