Anna Burns's unlikely journey to winning the Man Booker Prize

Anna Burns’s new interview with The Guardian is only adding to her novel's underdog mystique.

Milkman, which won this year’s Man Booker Prize, was finished despite Burns’s extreme back pain (which she’s still fighting) and poverty (she roamed England, house-sitting and visiting food banks to make ends meet).

And it was published despite an early string of rejections.

“It feels wonderful, it feels dreamlike. Did that really happen?" Burns said of her win. " ...  It’s nice to feel I’m solvent. That’s a huge, huge gift.”

Learn more about her astonishing victory, in her own words, here.