Attention cover art

Attention

Writing on Life, Art and the World

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Attention

By: Anne Enright
Narrated by: Anne Enright
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The first collection of Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright's non-fiction writing about culture, literature and her own life

For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights.

These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Dublin to Galway, Canada to Honduras. They delve into Enright’s own family history, and explore the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society and fiction. She offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter.

In Enright’s fiction, speech can transform, rupture, enliven and liberate. In these essays, she speaks to us directly. Electrifying, probing and exuberant, this is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.

'One of the most gifted writers working in English today' Jennifer Egan

© Anne Enright 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Art & Literature Authors Essays Literary History & Criticism Fiction

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Critic reviews

With all its incisiveness, wit and brilliant sanity, Anne Enright's Attention provides a glorious antidote to the mad, sad world (Eimear McBride)
The provocative, wise, compassionate turns her writing takes, always so alert, so attuned, so alive (Lucy Caldwell)
Anne Enright’s essays are a joy to read: incisive, wise, often humorous, they are explorations of the way we live in the world today. I turned down so many page-corners as I read that I now cannot shut my copy of the book. (Maggie O'Farrell)
Anne Enright might just be Ireland’s greatest living writer… This autumn she’s publishing a collection of essays… I’m rereading her novels in anticipation (Laura Hackett)
Anne Enright is a dazzling novelist…and an insightful essay writer… Attention confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels
In Attention you can experience the energy of her essayistic mind, whirring with ideas of justice, truth and imagination. It’s a remarkable place to be
What a pleasure this book is… I have admired Enright’s writing for a long time, but it struck me that she is one of the best essayists alive, as well as one of the best novelists, and ought to get more recognition for the former (Megan Nolan)
My feeling reading this collection is that each precious line needs going over twice. First for the sound and shape of the words, the second for their meaning… [Enright] write[s] like a sharp, funny fallen angel and we will pay attention
Enright’s writing has a sense of searching, as though you are thinking along with her? – a style that renders her insights no less brilliantly sharp
It was hard to select my favourite essays of 2025…the standout publication was Attention… [which] confirms the intelligence, compassion and humour of the mind behind the novels
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