Milkman by author Anna Burns has been awarded the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Burns from Belfast, Ireland, is the first Northern Ireland author to win the prize. Burns was praised by the judges, including chair Kwame Anthony Appiah who said in a statement: Milkman “challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose. It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humor. Set in a society divided against itself, Milkman explores the insidious forms oppression can take in everyday life.’
Graywolf Publishing is the Ms. Burns publisher and it is the first time in their company’s history that they’ve had an author win the prize. Fiona McCraw, Graywolf publisher said: “We are all over the moon that Anna Burns has won the Man Booker Prize, the first time in Graywolf history that an author we have published has had this honor.”
Faber and Faber the U.K. publisher of Milkman has gone back to press with an additional 45,000 print run of the novel.
The Man Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for five decades.
