Author Guide · Literary Fiction
Books Written by
Anne Enright, born in Dublin in 1962, spent six years as a producer and director at the Irish broadcaster RTÉ before she left television and began writing full-time in 1993. Her first book, the story collection The Portable Virgin, had already won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1991. In October 2007 her fourth novel, The Gathering, about a family wake after a brother drowns at Brighton, won the Man Booker Prize. In 2015 the Irish state made her its first Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her subject, from the start, has been the Irish family: who stays, who leaves, and what nobody says. This guide covers her 12 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 key books · 1991–2025 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Anne Enright has published eight novels, two story collections and two books of non-fiction. Her best-known book is The Gathering (2007), which won the Man Booker Prize; the others most read are The Forgotten Waltz (2011), The Green Road (2015) and The Wren, The Wren (2023). Start with The Green Road, a family Christmas in the west of Ireland told one child at a time. Read on for the order, the prizes and the 2007 controversy.
Where to Start with Anne Enright
If you want her most accessible novel
→ The Green Road (2015) — four grown children come home for one last Christmas.
If you want the Booker winner
→ The Gathering (2007) — the 2007 novel about a family wake.
If you want a love story that is also about money
→ The Forgotten Waltz (2011) — an affair in Dublin before and after the crash.
If you want her most recent novel
→ The Wren, The Wren (2023) — three generations in the shadow of a famous poet.
12 Anne Enright Books, in Order
The Portable Virgin
Her first book, a collection of short stories published while she was still working in television. It won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1991. The stories were later reissued with Taking Pictures in the combined volume Yesterday’s Weather (2008).
The Wig My Father Wore
Her first novel. Grace works in Dublin on a television game show called the Love Quiz; her father is becoming senile, and an angel called Stephen, a bridge builder who killed himself in 1934, moves into her flat. A comic, surreal book, quite unlike the realism of her later novels.
What Are You Like?
Twin girls are born in Dublin in 1965; their mother dies of a brain tumour, and their father, Berts, keeps one, Maria, and gives the other up for adoption. She is renamed Rose and grows up with an English couple in London. The novel follows both women into their twenties, each sensing something missing. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and won the Encore Award in 2001.
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch
A novel about a real woman: Eliza Lynch, born in County Cork, who met Francisco Solano López in Europe in 1854 and went with him to Paraguay, where he later led the country into a catastrophic war. The story is told partly by Eliza and partly by López’s Scottish doctor, William Stewart, and each chapter is named after an object or a food.
Making Babies
Her first book of non-fiction: short, frank pieces about pregnancy, birth and the first years of looking after her children, written as it happened rather than in hindsight.
The Gathering
Veronica Hegarty is one of twelve children. When her brother Liam is found drowned in the sea at Brighton with stones in his pockets, the nine surviving siblings gather in Dublin for the wake, and Veronica tries to work out what happened in their grandmother Ada’s house when Liam was a boy, and what a family friend called Nugent did to him. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2007 and Irish Novel of the Year in 2008.
Taking Pictures
Her second story collection, published by Jonathan Cape in March 2008, the spring after the Booker. The same year it was combined with The Portable Virgin as Yesterday’s Weather, 31 stories in all.
The Forgotten Waltz
Gina Moynihan looks back, during a snowy Dublin winter, on her affair with a married man, Seán Vallely, which ran through the years of the Irish property boom and its collapse. It won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize the same year.
The Green Road
Rosaleen Madigan has four children: Hanna, Dan, Constance and Emmet. The first half gives each of them a chapter, between 1980 and 2005, in places from Limerick and New York to Mali; in the second half they come home for Christmas, because their mother has decided to sell the family house, and on Christmas night she goes missing. It won Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa and the Baileys Women’s Prize.
Actress
The novelist Norah FitzMaurice writes the true story of her mother, Katherine O’Dell, born in London in 1928 to touring actors, who rose from the Irish stage to the West End, Broadway and Hollywood, and who was best remembered at the end of her life for shooting a television producer in the foot. It was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020.
The Wren, The Wren
Three generations of one family live in the shadow of Phil McDaragh, a celebrated Irish poet who left his wife and two daughters. His granddaughter Nell, in her twenties, wants a poetic life of her own; her mother, Carmel, who raised her alone, is still shaped by his leaving. Poems about birds run through the book. It won the Writers’ Prize for Fiction in 2024 and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Attention
Her first collection of essays: 24 pieces written between 2007 and 2025, in three sections, “Voices”, “Bodies” and “Time”. She writes on Alice Munro, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Helen Garner and Angela Carter, on the Mother and Baby Homes and the 2018 Irish abortion referendum, and on her own family.
In What Order to Read Anne Enright
None of her books continues from another, so there is no series order. Publication order does show a change: the books of the 1990s are playful and strange, with angels and game shows, and from What Are You Like? onwards she turns to realism and to Irish families across several generations.
A good route is to start with The Green Road or The Gathering, then read The Forgotten Waltz and The Wren, The Wren. Save The Wig My Father Wore and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch for later, when you know her voice and can see where it came from.
A reading path
1. The Green Road (2015)
2. The Gathering (2007)
3. The Forgotten Waltz (2011)
4. The Wren, The Wren (2023)
5. Attention (2025)
Everything Else Anne Enright Published
Beyond the 12 key books: 2 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Collected stories and anthologies
2
2 books · 2008–2010
- 2008Yesterday’s WeatherThe Portable Virgin and Taking Pictures in one volume, 31 stories
- 2010The Granta Book of the Irish Short Storyan anthology she edited and introduced
The years · 1962–2025
Quick facts about Anne Enright
- Known for
- She is known for unsentimental, darkly funny novels about Irish families, above all The Gathering, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2007.
- 1962
- Born in Dublin
- 1991
- The Portable Virgin wins the Rooney Prize
- 2007
- The Gathering
- 2025
- Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction
- Born
- 11 October 1962, Dublin, Ireland
- Education
- English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin; MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where she studied under Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury
- Worked
- Producer and director at RTÉ for six years, including the programme Nighthawks
- Laureate
- First Laureate for Irish Fiction, 2015–2018
- Honours
- Man Booker Prize (2007), Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award (2022), Windham-Campbell Prize (2025)
- Teaches
- School of English, University College Dublin, since 2018
- Lives
- Dublin, with her husband, Martin Murphy; they have a son and a daughter
The red mark is 2007: The Gathering, the novel that won her the Man Booker Prize.
How Anne Enright Writes: The Family, Up Close
Most of her novels are told in the first person by a woman looking back at her family: Veronica in The Gathering, Gina in The Forgotten Waltz, Norah in Actress. The narrator is often unsure of what she remembers. The Gathering opens with Veronica saying she would like to write down what happened in her grandmother’s house, and admitting she does not know if it really happened.
She builds novels out of separate parts. The Green Road gives each of the four Madigan children a chapter of their own, years and continents apart, before bringing them back to one house. The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch alternates two narrators, and The Wren, The Wren moves between Nell, Carmel and the poet Phil, sets out dialogue without quotation marks and threads poems through the prose.
Her early books, written after she studied with Angela Carter, are openly fantastic: an angel lodges in a Dublin flat in The Wig My Father Wore. From What Are You Like? onwards she writes realism, but keeps the precision. Her own rule, from a 2010 list of rules for writers in The Guardian, is that description is always an opinion about the world.
Frequently asked questions about Anne Enright’s books
How many books has Anne Enright written?
Twelve books of her own, not counting reissues: eight novels, two short story collections and two books of non-fiction, from The Portable Virgin (1991) to Attention (2025). The two story collections were also published together as Yesterday’s Weather (2008), and she edited The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story (2010).
What are Anne Enright’s books in order?
The Portable Virgin (1991), The Wig My Father Wore (1995), What Are You Like? (2000), The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002), Making Babies (2004), The Gathering (2007), Taking Pictures (2008), The Forgotten Waltz (2011), The Green Road (2015), Actress (2020), The Wren, The Wren (2023) and Attention (2025).
Where should I start with Anne Enright?
The Green Road (2015). Each of the four Madigan children has a chapter of their own before the family comes home for Christmas, so it is easy to follow. If you want the book she is best known for, start with The Gathering.
What is Anne Enright’s most famous book?
The Gathering (2007), about the Hegarty family gathering in Dublin for the wake of their brother Liam, who drowned at Brighton. It won the Man Booker Prize in October 2007, ahead of favourites including Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.
What prizes has Anne Enright won?
The Man Booker Prize for The Gathering (2007), the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz (2012), the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award for The Green Road, the Writers’ Prize for Fiction for The Wren, The Wren (2024) and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction (2025). She has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize three times.
Is The Gathering a sad book?
It deals with grief, suicide and the sexual abuse of a child, and Veronica’s anger runs through it. It is also sharp and often darkly funny. The chair of the Booker judges, Howard Davies, called it an unflinching look at a grieving family.
What was the Anne Enright McCann controversy?
In October 2007, the month she won the Booker, the London Review of Books published her Diary piece “Disliking the McCanns”, about the parents of Madeleine McCann, who had disappeared in Portugal that May. Newspapers quoted its harshest passages and critics called it prejudiced; the piece itself also retracts some of what she admits thinking.
Do Anne Enright’s books need to be read in order?
No. Each novel stands alone, with its own family and characters, so you can begin anywhere. Reading in publication order shows her move from the comic, surreal early books to the realism of The Gathering and after.
Is Anne Enright still alive?
Yes. She was born on 11 October 1962 in Dublin, where she lives and teaches at University College Dublin. Her most recent book is the essay collection Attention (2025).
What was the Laureate for Irish Fiction?
A three-year public post to promote Irish fiction. Enright was appointed the first Laureate by the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, in January 2015 and held it until 2018.
Footnotes
- Anne Enright — Wikipedia
- Anne Enright — The Booker Prizes
- Anne Enright — British Council Literature
- Anne Enright — Windham-Campbell Prizes
- The Wren, The Wren — The Writers’ Prize 2024
- Anne Enright captured a prevalent unease about the McCann story — Magill
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.”
— Anne Enright, “Ten rules for writing fiction”, The Guardian (2010)
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