Attention

Writing on Life, Art and the World

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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.

Taking us from Ireland to Canada to Honduras, these essays delve into her family history, explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction, and offer new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison and James Joyce.

Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.

With all its incisiveness, wit and brilliant sanity, Anne Enright's Attention provides a glorious antidote to the mad, sad world
Eimear McBride

About Anne Enright

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and eight novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Other award include the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz, 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.

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Details

Imprint: Vintage
Published: 03/09/2026
ISBN: 9781529959673
Length: 288 pages
Price: £12.99

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Attention

Writing on Life, Art and the World

Format:

Pre-order:

**With all its incisiveness, wit and brilliant sanity, Anne Enright's Attention provides a glorious antidote to the mad, sad world**

The provocative, wise, compassionate turns her writing takes, always so alert, so attuned, so alive

Anne Enright’s essays are a joy to read: incisive, wise, often humorous, they are explorations of the way we live in the world today. I turned down so many page-corners as I read that I now cannot shut my copy of the book.

Anne Enright might just be Ireland’s greatest living writer… This autumn she’s publishing a collection of essays… I’m rereading her novels in anticipation

Anne Enright is a dazzling novelist…and an insightful essay writer… Attention confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels

In Attention you can experience the energy of her essayistic mind, whirring with ideas of justice, truth and imagination. It’s a remarkable place to be

What a pleasure this book is… I have admired Enright’s writing for a long time, but it struck me that she is one of the best essayists alive, as well as one of the best novelists, and ought to get more recognition for the former

My feeling reading this collection is that each precious line needs going over twice. First for the sound and shape of the words, the second for their meaning… [Enright] write[s] like a sharp, funny fallen angel and we will pay attention

Enright’s writing has a sense of searching, as though you are thinking along with her? – a style that renders her insights no less brilliantly sharp

It was hard to select my favourite essays of 2025…the standout publication was Attention… [which] confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels

About Anne Enright

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