Anna Burns

Milkman is narrated by an eighteen-year-old known only as middle sister, in a city that goes unnamed, during a conflict that goes unnamed, as an older paramilitary figure starts following her and the district draws its own conclusions. Nobody in the book carries a name, only a role. It took the Booker Prize in 2018, and Anna Burns became the first writer from Northern Ireland to win it. Born in Belfast on 7 March 1962, she grew up in Ardoyne, a working-class Catholic district, attended St Gemma's High School, and moved to London in 1987. Her debut, No Bones, drew on the same years of the Troubles and won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize; Little Constructions followed, then the novella Mostly Hero. Milkman went on to take the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2019 and the International Dublin Literary Award in 2020. Burns was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2021 and lives in East Sussex.