Episode Details

This episode of “Irish Writers in America,” a new 13 part series from CUNY TV (City University of New York television station), features a long-form interview with Anne Enright, who won the Man Booker prize for her novel, The Gathering, and whose more recent novel, The Forgotten Waltz, was awarded the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Anne Enright talks about how being given a typewriter by her parents – rather than the stethoscope and calculator that were given to her siblings – led her down the path of the writer. She explains what she hopes to achieve with each sentence she writes, and her feelings about Ireland as a place where the lives of women were impacted by an expectation of “loveliness.” She discusses the parallel between an adulterous relationship and the Irish economic crash in her new novel, The Forgotten Waltz, and the particular manner in which a short story comes to be, as opposed to a novel. Her book, Making Babies, serves as the basis for a discussion of how motherhood led to a burst of literary creativity.

Interviewed in a rooftop garden in Greenwich Village, Enright speaks frankly about the Irish writer’s need to keep Ireland at arm’s length and how winning a major prize affects the constant endeavor to create new work.

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