When it comes to the Man Booker prize, it’s just like the screenwriter William Goldman said: “No one knows anything.” How else to explain the bookies’ unwillingness to pick the winner? Indeed, when Anne Enright, the little-known Irish author of The Gathering, and the “rank outsider” in the race for the 2007 prize, romped past the favourites, Ian McEwan and Lloyd Jones, on Tuesday night, she became the fifth consecutive writer to confound the odds.

Enright never put much faith in the bookmakers – “They don’t read, so how would they know?” – but she was nonetheless shocked at landing the prize. She is the fourth Irish winner, after Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle and John Banville, and she knows that the £50,000 cheque is only the start of her residency at literature’s top table. But, she says: “I don’t know whether it will make it easier or harder for me to write now.”

Such ambivalence can probably be assigned to a little morning-after tenderness. The 45-year-old mother of two managed just four hours’ sleep between Tuesday night’s party and her first media appointment on Wednesday, an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Now, it is late morning, and Enright, in a black spotty dress, her short hair needing a little attention, is experiencing “a light throbbing in the head”.

She was right to celebrate. The Booker prize has not just raised her stock, but, in a difficult market for modern fiction, served as a welcome fillip for her sales. Before Enright’s appearance on the shortlist, The Gathering had sold, according to Nielsen Book-Scan, fewer than 1,000 copies. By Tuesday, it had sold more than 3,000. It will now, she can confidently assume, ship a few thousand more. “Initially, I saw it all as a nice little boost,” she says. “When I got on the shortlist, I realised there was really no downside to the whole business. The only thing was, I’d had such a good time on the shortlist, I was dreading the announcement, when it would all come to an end. But now, I think, ‘Oh my God, I’ve won the Booker.’ ” The Gathering may have beaten all-comers to the Booker, but it will struggle to squeeze into most Top 10 beach reads. The novel surrounds a sprawling Irish family, the Hegartys, and the decision of one of their number, Liam, to drown himself in Brighton wearing a Day-Glo jacket. What follows is an investigation by the narrator, Veronica – the seventh oldest, or fifth youngest, child, depending on how you look at it – into the family’s hinterland, including a recollection of sexual abuse, rendered without a whiff of mawkishness in Enright’s lean prose.

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BACKGROUND

• The tide that runs through the Booker

• Unknown has great Booker expectations

• No certainties as judges pick interesting list

• McEwan could be pipped to Booker

• 13 novels make Booker’s dozen

BACKGROUND

• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

• The Gathering by Anne Enright

• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker

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Despite the quality of the writing, the novel is undeniably gloomy. Indeed, when Robert Harris, bestselling author of Fatherland and Pompeii, launched his invective against the Booker last week, saying agents put pressure on authors to write “Booker-winning” novels that were “grim and unreadable and utterly off-putting to many readers”, he might have had it in mind.

“Well, nobody told me to write a grim book,” Enright says. “I’ve never been biddable as a writer. If someone did tell me what to write, it just wouldn’t work when I got to my desk. So they can say what they like, really. My business is to write books. I can’t have a larger opinion about the Booker prize.”

The business of writing books started for Enright when she was given a typewriter for her 21st birthday. Since then, she has studied for a Masters in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where she was taught by Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. But her life as a novelist began in earnest only after a stint working as a producer on an Irish chat show, and a subsequent breakdown. “We were live three nights a week,” she says. “We drank our heads off. It was inevitable it should crash and burn at some stage.” Since then, she has written four novels: The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, What Are You Like?, The Wig My Father Wore and The Gathering. She has also published a nonfiction work, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, and a collection of stories, The Portable Virgin. Her next collection, Taking Pictures, will be published in March.

Evidence of her voracious reading life, too, shines out in The Gathering. She imagines, for instance, the 1920s Dublin of Veronica’s grandparents – a place and time for ever associated with James Joyce, whose work has inspired her own. Was she nervous about comparisons? “No, and, if you don’t mind me saying, that’s quite a masculine way of looking at it,” she says. “There are writers in Ireland who think Joyce threw a great shadow, who are in awe of him. I think that’s all bollocks. He cast a great light.

He opened all the doors and gave freedom for people to write what they wanted. If I have a slight homage, it’s not because I want to come out better than him. It’s not a fisticuffs with Joyce.”

Irish writers have long recognised her talent – Colm Toibin’s prediction that her “ship would come in” has proved accurate – but she has never been a “big name”.

And, if Howard Davies, chairman of the Booker judges, is to be believed, it is harder for small names to receive the acclaim established writers get.

Davies said the judges “were surprised by the reverential tone adopted by reviewers in relation to books that, to us, did not come off”.

Enright has received no such favours. The Sunday Times critic Hugo Barnacle mauled The Gathering, calling it “pretentious” and fix-ated with the Freudian notion of “the dirty-handkerchief side of life”, before concluding it was “wearing”. Enright, who reads all her reviews, if only to see how much space they take up on the page, was phlegmatic. “I do remember that review,” she says. “It weirded me out a bit. I have to say, if there’s any obsession with sex, it’s on the critic’s part. But reviews are always a mixed bag. The response to this has been strong – by which I mean, you either like the voice and are behind it, or you don’t and find the whole thing irritating. That’s good – I know I’ve written a book then.

“In Ireland, it’s interesting, because there isn’t really a culture of critical praise,” she continues. “But the book has really sold well there, I suspect by word of mouth. Reviews are only a barometer of what critics are thinking, which is not quite the whole picture.”

Enright’s ambition is, she says, simply to write. It is easier some days than others. In the house in Bray, Co Wicklow, that she shares with her husband, Martin, and her two children, aged 4 and 7, writing is sandwiched into school time and dark hours. “I have no real discipline,” she says. “I just write when I can. I have no targets. There has been a significant amount of juggling in the past, but it really works. I need to write. I go a bit bonkers if I don’t. Having children focuses you, because you have such limited time.”

If Enright thinks her time is limited now, she should consider what a year of being the Booker winner will do for her schedule. She has already received a taste. As our interview comes to a close, a PR apparatchik whisks her to the next appointment. I ask what she is doing for the rest of the day. “Who knows?” she says. “My life is no longer my own.”

— The Gathering is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £11.69 (inc p&p); 0870 165 8585.

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