Anne Enright’s 12 books include the memoir Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004), The Gathering, which won the 2007 Booker prize, and 2015’s The Green Road, a family saga described by the New Yorker as storytelling with “the blood-pulse of lived gossip”. She’s currently on the shortlist for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction (the winner will be announced on 13 June), with The Wren, the Wren, now out in paperback. It follows the daughter and granddaughter of a fictitious Irish poet, Phil McDaragh, whose poetry – written by Enright – appears in the novel and was initially published under McDaragh’s byline in the London Review of Books. Enright, 61, was speaking from her home in Dublin.
When did you start this novel?
April 2020. I’d just had the last book out [Actress] when the bookshops closed and the market disappeared; I came back from America after a tour that collapsed as the world locked down. It felt like five years of work had been taken away from me.
