Anne Enright, who’s up for a second Booker Prize right now and is the first-ever laureate for Irish fiction: “Writers are never telling wonderful stories about Ireland, they’re telling interesting stories about Ireland, and Ireland doesn’t necessarily appreciate that. So for me to be accepted, for a female voice – with all the anxiety there is about the female voice in Ireland – for that somehow to dissolve, and this symbolic thing of the laureateship, is just lovely.”