Manini Chatterjee on This Year’s Booker Winner Anne Enright

Writer, columnist Manini Chatterjee writes about Booker Prize winner Anne Enright (who was her classmate at the Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific, a small pre-university college nestled among giant Douglas firs on Vancouver Island) thus in this article in The Telegraph:

Quote

“Anne, I must confess, was not my best friend. Her fellow Dubliner, Fiona Healy, was. And Fiona’s world was divided neatly in two — those who came from the north of the Liffey (the river that flows through the centre of Dublin) and those who were residents of the south. The rich spoilt brats of Dublin all lived south of the river that cut through the city; the working class peopled the north.

“Fiona, daughter of a feisty postman, was quintessentially north. (As a young girl, she once asked her father the meaning of the word plutocrat. “A plutocrat,” he replied, “is someone who is stinking rich. We, my dear, merely stink.”)

And further on…

“Except in Theo’s English literature class. The Liffey disappeared for a few hours every day as Fiona and Anne and I — the Irish and Indians were also considered the most “literary” since the word “nerdy” was still some years away — had furious arguments about Virginia Woolf and Keats, T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare.”

Unquote

Manini Chatterjee | Anne Enright | Booker Prize 2007 |