Literary Birthday – 7 March – Anna Burns

Happy Birthday, Anna Burns, born 7 March 1962.

Anna Burns Quotes

1. My creative process involves turning up at the desk and waiting. It’s a very active, receptive waiting for characters to turn up and to start telling me their stories. (Women’s Prize)
2. Books by women which have inspired me to write would be Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg;  If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland; Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande; The Artist’s Way and The Right to Write by Julia Cameron. These books don’t mythologize writing. They speak of following your instinct, not worrying too much about reasons when you write. The thing was to commit, to turn up, do something, even if not much and even if you believe you’re not really doing anything, or anything ‘worthy’, even if you don’t even know what it is you are doing.(Women’s Prize)
3. I follow what my characters tell me. My responsibility is to get the world within the book as true to itself as I can, then to try to get it published. Readers, of course, will come to their own interpretation of it. (Women’s Prize)
4. I find it next to impossible to write about anything that is overly painful to me in the moment. (Times Literary Supplement)
5. I discover the book from them [the characters] as I write it. Frequently I am surprised and astonished by what they come and say. They are their own people. There are no guarantees. That’s the bargain. There is no bargain. They call the shots. They also tend to give me information backwards. So it’s a messy process. Eventually though, the book cleans itself. (The New School)
6. Rather than trying to depict an actual environment with its historical events and specific locations, what’s important to me as a novelist is to get the world of the fiction true to itself, with its own inner logic and connections and emotional reality. I do this by writing what comes. The reality of the fictional world may end up being askew from the actual place it seems to be based on. To what extent that turns out to be the case is dictated by the story and the characters. (The New School)
7. As a writer, I think it is absolutely fascinating to explore that whole theme of borders and barriers and the dreaded other. (The Guardian)

Anna Burns is an award-winning author from Northern Ireland. She is the author of three novels, No Bones, Little Constructions, and Milkman – and one novella, Mostly Hero. No Bones won the 2001 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for the best regional novel of the year in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Milkman won the 2018 Booker Prize, the 2019 Orwell Prize for political fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2021, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Image details: DublinLibrarian, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anna_Burns.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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