Attention Hardcover by Anne Enright

Product Details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (2026-04-07)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 288 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780771034459
• Item Weight: 436.59 grams
• Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.9 x 2.44 cm

One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026

From one of our most distinguished literary voices, a defining essay collection blending personal reflection with urgent political writing and wide–ranging cultural criticism.

For thirty years Anne Enright―one of our greatest living novelists (Times)―has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and drawing us into her precise insights. These essays, collated from throughout Enright’s career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen–eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: she interprets Sophocles’s Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway; writes on Ireland’s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights; and offers new perspectives on writers such as Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner, and Angela Carter.
    True to the themes that saturate her award–winning fiction, Attention explores the intersection between the personal and political, complex family dynamics, and the body in crystalline, urgent prose. This stunning collection unites Enright’s cultural criticism, literary, and autobiographical writing for the first time.

About the Author

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, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gáis Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Her most recent novel, The Wren, The Wren, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature. She is also the recipient of the 2022 Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2024 Writers' Prize for Fiction, and the 2025 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.