The Portable Virgin

Witty and acerbic…unusual and elegant. She is a writer to watch * Today *Introduces a new voice in Irish fiction…a quirky, subversive, original wit and an imaginative linguistic fluency which must be interpreted as the consolidation of a new literary maturity – Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *In sentence after sentence as cool and clear-headed as the moment a migraine lifts, these pained, precise, disquieting stories restore to us the strangeness of the lives we follow beneath the surface of the lives we lead. The Portable Virgin is a remarkable debut – Aidan MatthewsA great new Irish talent which we’re bound to enjoy again. I can’t wait * Irish Indepedent *

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 awards 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.