Then one day this teacher strode in - Pat McCann - and he said: ‘What are you all doing? You are all sleeping. “I was always tired and there was a teacher who was boring. Īnna Burns’ novel, Milkman won the 2018 Man Booker Prize By this time, she had moved to the university area and got occasional work as a copytaker (an individual employed to type reports as journalists dictate them over the telephone) for the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish News. It was a night class in English at the College of Business Studies that formally introduced her to literature. She regularly mitched school and preferred to educate herself. Remarkably, Burns did not benefit from much of a formal education. “There was the disconnection of thoughts and feelings,” she says. Much like Milkman’s protagonist, the unnamed ‘Middle Sister’, Burns did her best to avoid the political situation around her. In an interview with The Independent, Burns recalled how “the soldiers at the refugee camp south of the border in the Republic of Ireland brought her more food than she had seen before…She couldn’t have been more upset when she was sent back to school.” In 1969, her family became one of the hundreds evacuated from Ardoyne as the violence intensified in the aftermath of the burning of Bombay Street. Like many of her generation, Burns’ formative years were defined by the developing conflict in Northern Ireland. Reading formed an integral part of her childhood and Burns describes hers as a ‘bookish family’. “I’d go over to the house so I had all that rowdiness, which was important, then I’d go back to my aunt’s for the quietness”.
As was common among large families living in small homes known as ‘kitchen houses’, she lived with her unmarried aunt over the road. Anna Burns is an award-winning author best known for her third novel Milkman, which was awarded the Man Booker prize in 2018: this marked the first time the award had a Northern Irish recipient. Born in North Belfast in 1962, Burns’ writing reflects her upbringing during the early years of the Troubles and the lingering impact of the violence she experienced.īurns grew up as one of seven siblings in a working-class, Catholic family in Ardoyne.
0 kommentar(er)
