Description

The first collection of Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright’s non-fiction writing about culture, literature and her own life

‘Anne Enright might just be Ireland’s greatest living writer’ The Times

‘One of the most gifted writers working in English today’ Jennifer Egan

For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights.

These essays, collated from across Enright’s career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras. They delve into Enright’s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. She offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter.

In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.

Praise for The Wren, The Wren:

‘A magnificent novel’ SALLY ROONEY

‘A triumph…treasure it’ Sunday Times

‘One of the great living writers on the subject of family’ New York Times

‘A must-read’ MARGARET ATWOOD (on Twitter)

‘A pleasure from beginning to end’ Irish Times

Publisher Review

Anne Enright might just be Ireland’s greatest living writer… This autumn she’s publishing a collection of essays… I’m rereading her novels in anticipation — Laura Hackett * The Times, *Autumn Picks of 2025* * With all its incisiveness, wit and brilliant sanity, Anne Enright’s Attention provides a glorious antidote to the mad, sad world — Eimear McBride The provocative, wise, compassionate turns her writing takes, always so alert, so attuned, so alive — Lucy Caldwell Anne Enright is a dazzling novelist…and an insightful essay writer… Attention confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels * Independent *