Anne Enright burst onto the Irish literary scene in 1991 with her collection of short stories,
The Portable Virgin.She was immediately hailed as “a new voice in Irish fiction” (
The Irish Times, 25 February 1991) and
The Portable Virginwon the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature that year.
Enright quickly established a reputation for a playful, innovative, postmodern, even post-feminist, style of writing. Distinguishing herself from the mimetic realism for which much Irish writing is noted, she was perceived, at least in the early days, as using parody, pastiche and satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Flann O’Brien. She herself regards her work as at odds with much of Irish writing:
Irish prose tends to cling to the world in an unconfident way. This is a table, this is a
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Citation: Ingman, Heather. "Anne Enright". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 May 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12065, accessed 31 October 2024.]
