Irish author Anne Enright has won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her novel, The Gathering, which is sure to make Grove Atlantic happy. The indie publisher had just released the novel as a Black Cat paperback original, with critical enthusiasm, and already it’s in the top 30 on Amazon.com. Literary observers had given the edge in the Booker competition to Ian McEwan‘s On Chesil Beach, and panel judge Tom Adair conceded that The Gathering was, as Sarah Lyall put it in the NY Times, “‘not everybody’s first choice,’ but rather ‘a choice with which all the judges were happy.'”
So what does Enright have to look forward to? Last year’s winner, Kiran Desai, recently spoke with Abebooks.com about how the Booker changed her life. “You realize that to win a prize is basically childish,” Desai says. “The pleasure you feel is childish, which is nice too. But the frightening thing is that it has a serious, serious effect.”