Irish Writer Enright Wins Booker Prize

LONDON — An Irish writer, Anne Enright, won the Man Booker fiction prize yesterday for "The Gathering," an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family.

She is the second Irish writer to win the prize in the past three years, after John Banville's "The Sea" in 2005. Ms. Enright had been considered a long-shot to take Britain's most prestigious, and contentious, literary trophy. The award, which carries a prize of $100,000, was bestowed at London's Guildhall.

"The Gathering" is a family epic set in England and Ireland, in which a brother's suicide prompts 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty to probe her family's troubled, tangled history.