Anne Enright is to be honoured with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2022
Booker Prize winner Anne Enright will be presented with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at the An Post Book Awards ceremony on 23 November.
Enright joins a gallery of bright lights including Sebastian Barry, Colm Toibín, Eavan Boland, Maeve Binchy and Séamus Heaney.
In conferring the award, the Board of the Irish Book Awards said that Enright has occupied a central position in the cultural life of Ireland for over three decades.
“In a literary career that has delivered seven novels, three short story collections, a memoir of motherhood, and the 2007 Booker Prize for her fourth novel, The Gathering, Enright has been an integral part of Ireland’s contemporary literary renaissance, earning her a substantial international reputation in the process.
Detecting ‘a familiar Irish talkiness in her work’ the critic, James Wood, has described her as a rich, lyrical prose writer, who cascades among novelties – again and again finding the unexpected adjective, the just noun’.
“A quintessentially Irish writer, she is widely admired in her own country for the wit, warmth, and eloquence she brings to the role of artist and public intellectual, never more so than when fulfilling her role as the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction in the years between 2015 and 2018.
“Booksellers, like readers and critics, have favourite writers. Any book sold keeps Yeats’s ‘greasy till’ chiming but there are certain writers whose work booksellers actively enjoy recommending to their customers.
Booksellers warm to authors who fulfil the peripheral demands of public profile and trade interaction with good grace. It is those good friends of the book trade that our Lifetime Achievement Award is designed to honour and no writer has been a greater friend to Irish booksellers than Anne Enright.”
Brendan Corbett, Chairperson of the An Post Irish Book Awards says that The Board of the An Post Irish Books Awards is delighted to present Anne Enright with the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award.
“She has been an inspiration, not just to her readership, but to younger writers breaking through. The Irish book industry will be forever in her debt.”
The An Post Irish Book Awards celebrate and promote Irish writing to the widest range of readers possible. Each year it brings together a vast community passionate about books – readers, authors, booksellers, publishers and librarians – to recognise the very best of Irish writing talent across 18 categories. See the full list of nominees here.
A one-hour special, hosted by Oliver Callan, will be broadcast on RTÉ One television on Wednesday 7th December exploring the six books and authors competing for the accolade of An Post Irish Book Awards Book of the Year 2022, which will end by revealing this year’s overall winner.
