Maggie O'Farrell & Anne Enright

Anne Enright and Maggie O'Farrell had both written novels of grace and power which grapple unflinchingly with modern concepts of family and isolation.

Anne Enright's collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, won the Rooney Prize, and her novel, What Are You Like? was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and won the Encore Award. Her Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Gathering, is a family epic condensed and clarified through the remarkable lens of Anne Enright's unblinking eye. It injects fresh blood through the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new.

Maggie O’Farrell’s debut novel, After You’d Gone, was published to international acclaim, and won a Betty Trask Award, while her third, The Distance Between Us, won the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award. Her latest novel, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox tells the story of Esme, a woman edited out of her family`s history, and of the secrets that come to light when, sixty years later, she is released from care.