Anne Enright, author of ATTENTION: WRITING ON LIFE, ART, AND THE WORLD

Anne Enright has written eight novels, most recently The Wren, The Wren, for which she was on the show in 2023. She won the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. In 2022, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards.  

Her latest collection of essays is Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and the World. These 24 essays cover a lot of ground, but one big theme is how Anne reads other writers, and specifically how she reads them today in contrast to how she’s read them before. There are familiar names like Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Edna O’ Brien, Samuel Beckett, and Alice Munroe. But some obscure writers, as well.  

Anne joins Marrie Stone to talk about reading, both for the joy of it and for the study of it, writing, attention, our waning attention spans, and how being a woman has played a role in every one of these topics.  

For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website.

(Recorded March 31, 2026)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)  

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Allegra Goodman, author of THIS IS NOT ABOUT US