It has been almost three years since then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny announced Anne Enright as the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction.
With her tenure coming to a close, she joined Sean O’Rourke to discuss some of the work she did during that time. "I thought I was going to do one thing and I ended up doing something else!" Anne said, stating that her original interest was in promoting Irish translation but she ended up focusing a lot on the short story and also on issues of gender that have come to the fore in so many areas over the past few years.
"It just became incumbent upon me, apart from the fact that it’s very much in the air, and then Trump came in and suddenly you had to stand up and be counted… I’m all about the numbers. How many women opposed to men are represented in what forums, and where? And once you get the numbers right it doesn’t matter about how you feel."
Anne cites the case of novelist Catherine Nichols who received little interest for her script until she changed her name to George and got eight times as many responses. Anne says it’s important to remember that this isn’t necessarily a fair experiment as Catherine couldn’t try the same agents twice, but still, she finds the figure astounding.
"These agents are great fools because female writers sell more than males just across the board… She got eight times as much response as a man for exactly the same words on exactly the same page."
Anne says she was equally disheartened in 2012 when she started counting the number of reviews of books by women in The Irish Times. She found none at all in the first weeks of January but is relieved things have improved significantly since then.
"In 2013 it was up to 29% and now, 2016 was the last year I could count, it was up to 39%… The disheartening, dispiriting, totally incomprehensible thing is that surely it happened without anyone noticing… this is why I’m all about the numbers."
As for her own work, Anne jokes that she’s chugging along at the rate of 200 words a day.
"I’ll do that for another year and it’ll be War and Peace!"
