Anne Enright's Blog

As a small press launches dedicated to new male fiction, authors including Anne Enright and Nikesh Shukla ask if men are really being pushed out of publishing

Jude Cook, author and publisher of Conduit Books
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the languid Lord Henry announces: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

I’m not so sure. During the days after the announcement of my new small press, Conduit Books, the conversation about the balance and representation of women and men in publishing roared back into life. The reason was that, initially at least, Conduit Books will publish literary fiction and memoir by male authors; a modest attempt to address the relatively recent scarcity of young or new male writers in the small world of UK fiction.

A Booker-winning author, a Nobel prize-winning scientist and the directors of the film and stage adaptations on why Ishiguro’s dystopian tale still speaks to us today

• ‘AI will become very good at manipulating emotions’: an exclusive interview with Kazuo Ishiguro

Anne Enright
Booker-winning author and professor of fiction at University College Dublin
My writing students all know and love Never Let Me Go. Year after year, they choose to discuss it more than any other suggested title. These students are all ages but mostly young, so their affinity may have something to do with how tenderly Ishiguro writes about youth, innocence and friendship. The novel contains some of the tropes popular with readers of young adult fiction; there is an elite boarding school with beautiful grounds, various styles of guardian and no sign of any parents. Narrated by Kathy, who tells us about her friends Ruth and Tommy, the style is accessibly conversational and it contains a melancholy seriousness that young people value and sometimes use. The characters seem orphaned. They believe love might save them, and they die tragically early. They will never grow old.

If the story works close to folktale, the concept satisfies an anxious interest in speculative and dystopian fiction. The world on the page seems like our own, but it contains a huge and cruel secret, one that involves sinister doubling and the terrifying disposability of characters who are full of love and hopefulness. As I describe it here, the book sounds worse and worse, but there are reasons why this finely written novel should be treasured by readers who sometimes prefer fiction that is not so subtly done. With breathtaking focus and elan, Ishiguro uses the pleasures afforded by other genres and ignores them at the same time. The dystopia is etherised, it is everywhere and nowhere, waiting to be named. The rush of plot is replaced by steady storytelling and slow heartbreak. This is an impossibly sad novel, it offers no escape.

One woman’s quest, told through haunting, harrowing, dreamlike imagery, bears witness to Korea’s traumatic past

There are books in a writer’s life that gather all their previous themes and explorations in a great act of creative culmination, which both surpasses what had gone before and makes it more clear. We Do Not Part is one of those books. Published last year in Swedish translation, it helped to secure Korean writer Han Kang the 2024 Nobel prize in literature.

Those who know Han’s work will recognise previous themes and methods here. Like the eponymous character in The Vegetarian, the narrator of We Do Not Part, Kyungha, is fragile and resilient. She finds it hard to sleep or eat, suffers from summer heat and winter cold, and endures terrible physical suffering for reasons that can be hard to understand. Both stories feature video artists, sisterly bonds, and nightmares of murder and bloodshed set in Korean woodlands.

A master of the short story explores mortality and beyond, through these funny, boundlessly intelligent visions of the angel of death

America is an increasingly strange place these days, but perhaps the strangeness was always lurking in the things that made its culture seem familiar, even comforting, to those who were reared elsewhere. Take, for example, the use of the word “God”, who is always blessing America. He is not much invoked by politicians on this side of the Atlantic (except in Ulster, where He also did a great job), because we would find that specious. Nor do we have religious novelists, like the great Marilynne Robinson, who writes from a place of belief and teaches theology in her spare time. Faith and the problems of faith still animate American fiction. Even the bloody sacramentalism of Cormac McCarthy can feel religious, if only by opposition.

Like Robinson, Joy Williams is acquainted with the devil and she knows what it is to be saved. Williams’s father was a congregationalist preacher and her grandfather a Welsh Baptist minister. She has the same spiritual rhythms as Robinson, but the stakes are higher in Williams, and a lot more fun. She does horror and incomprehensibility as well as the ecstatic, and she does it all deadpan. I want to say that if you banged a Robinson novel off one by Cormac McCarthy, the sparks that flew would be something like Williams, except that neither of those writers does funny and Williams is the kind of funny you can’t explain. In her new collection Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael, the humour comes from Williams’s wryness and her brevity, the way she whisks a joke away, obliging the reader to follow on.

The acclaimed author of The Country Girls, which was burned in the market square of her home town, has died aged 93. Here, Irish novelists pay tribute to a titanic figure who liberated their country’s fiction

O’Brien blew open the possibilities for Irish fiction, not because of the taboos she broke but because she had broken them as a woman. In 1960, her first novel The Country Girls was burned in the market square of her home town of Scarriff, and every Irish woman who has published since is indebted to the hurt she took on there.

Introducing a photography special, the author considers how women’s stories have always been told through pictures – including of their own making

• 38 images that changed the way we see women (for better and for worse)

I have seen only three photographs of my father’s mother. In each she is neatly dressed and proud of her son, who is the reason the picture was taken. There are perhaps 10 images of my granny on my mother’s side; half are studio photos, a few more casually posed. These are images of people making a picture of themselves for future eyes, including mine, and their hopefulness makes me nostalgic. My granny is also accidentally included in a portrait of my mother’s dog, taken out in the garden. There she is in the background, scrubbing away at something in a zinc tub. Her sleeve is rolled up and the bare arm is shocking, though not indecent. Very thin and working hard, its whiteness shows how rarely her skin was in the sunshine. It looks so real.

If you want to imagine the privacy of the past, the shame it protected, or the way it was used to control women, just look to the many parts of the world where it still exists. Last month, the Iraqi social media influencer with the handle Om Fahad was shot dead, after her release from prison, for dancing on TikTok and talking about makeup and clothes.

From Anne Enright’s study of womanhood and youth to Rory Stewart’s insights into British politics, novelists and nonfiction writers reveal the books they will be giving as gifts – and the paperback they would love to find in their own stocking

Author of Tom Lake ( Bloomsbury)

The famous poets who wandered Dublin when Anne Enright was growing up were often inspired by beautiful young muses. But their obsessive love looks less romantic now, writes the novelist

My father, who grew up in the Irish countryside, rarely said a bad word about anyone; gossip irritated him and though he sometimes listened, he always dismissed it after as being “made up”. The most withering insult I heard him deliver was about an academic known to my siblings for sexual misconduct with students, a rumour he found unsurprising. “You’d see him, sure, on the top deck of the bus, going home.” What this man did on the bus we can only imagine, but my father’s contempt was clear – the man was drunk and on show. Of the poet Patrick Kavanagh he simply said, “You’d see him about the place.”

Irish writers were often publicly sighted. The woman who came to “do” for my mother on a Friday walked up and down the hall with her hands behind her back in imitation of WB Yeats strolling along St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, and the tea towel twitched behind her as the poet counted the meter of lines he was writing in his head.

The US essayist is a rare talent. In this slim volume she imagines a woman’s dying days with shocking clarity

About 10 years ago, I stopped reading an essay by the American author Jo Ann Beard because it was too good. It was about a man called Werner who woke to the sound of screaming one night and, after some delay, realised his apartment building was on fire. He was on the fifth floor. The way Beard described shock distorting his sense of time was so vivid I found it hard to breathe in the bookshop where I stood. I had no idea if Werner survived in real life, was disfigured or even died – it was possible Beard was entering the thoughts of a man in his last moments, or imagining them for us, and this seemed so unbearable I put the book down and walked away from one of the best writers at work today. (Werner survived; he dived head-first through the window of an apartment opposite and landed on a stranger’s bed. So phew.)

You can find Beard’s most famous essay, The Fourth State of Matter, online at the New Yorker. This memoir seems to be about Beard’s dog problem and also her divorce problem when she was working in an American university office. About halfway through, the details become so exhaustive, so saturated with a sense of imminence, that I couldn’t take it any longer and clicked away to find out what happened next. Warning: you will spoil your reading of Jo Ann Beard if you break the circumference of her prose. The essay relates facts so random and extreme it makes you query the process of reading itself. It also displays Beard’s talent for the incidental: the dying dog and the absent husband are not the main subjects here, but this small death and ordinary absence are given the proper weight of our regard.

Leading authors recommend the best recent books, from a forbidden love affair at the Western Front to a murder mystery set in Egypt

• See this year’s pick of 50 books for the summer

David Nicholls
I’m not sure if it counts as a traditional summer read ­– there were several moments that made me profoundly anxious ­– but I loved Claire Kilroy’s frantic, furious account of early motherhood, Soldier Sailor, a horror story at times, but full of love, too. Cecile Pin’s debut, Wondering Souls, manages to be both heartbreaking and hopeful and I’m also looking forward to Paul Murray’s new family saga, The Bee Sting; he’s such a sharp and funny writer.

Zadie Smith
I recently devoured Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. So enjoyable. I think Susan Sontag’s On Women is perfect if you want to think about the aesthetics of fascism and internecine feminist warfare during the summer – which I find I do. I also just finished Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner, out in July. Rare to find a novel with real stylistic and political ambition. Summer is the time for murders set somewhere interesting: Christopher Bollen is the master of these. His latest, The Lost Americans, set in Egypt, is a treat. On my holidays I’ll be packing Kairos because it’s by Jenny Erpenbeck, Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special – because it sounds intriguing – and The Mess We’re In by Annie Macmanus, because it’s set in the early 00s, in Kilburn, and full of music. Finally, in the hand luggage: The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph. I’ve had that one in manuscript form for over a year but didn’t dare read it because I was in the trenches, writing my own historical novel. Now I can’t wait.