Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright discusses her new collection of essays, Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World, and reflects on her writing career. 

From Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras, Anne’s essays delve into her 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. 

Don’t miss Anne in conversation with writer and Belfast Book Festival Patron Lucy Caldwell.

“So alert, so attuned, so alive” – Lucy Caldwell on Attention 

Meet the writers

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, two books of non-fiction, and eight novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Other awards include the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award and Novel of the Year (which she has won twice), the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature and the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction. Most recently she won the 2024 Writers' Prize for Fiction and the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.

Born in Belfast in 1981, Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three previous collections of short stories. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, she was also the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories in 2019, and has won the E. M. Forster Award, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Walter Scott Prize among others.