Attention

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 Anne Enright's career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen-eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: she interprets Sophocles' Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway, writes on Ireland’s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights, and offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter.

Attention brings Anne Enright’s wide-ranging cultural criticism, literary and autobiographical writing together for the first time. Explorations of the intersection between the personal and political, the subtleties of bodily autonomy, complex family dynamics and the challenges of intimacy preoccupy Anne Enright's award-winning and critically acclaimed fiction. Here we see Enright grappling with and answering these questions in her non-fiction. It is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.