More on Anna Burns's Man Booker Prize win

With the Man Booker news arriving a bit later in the workday for us, we wanted to revisit Anna Burns’s upset victory for Milkman.

Judges praised the bold style of Milkman, Burns’s third novel: Most of its characters (including the narrator) are unnamed, and it uses few paragraph breaks.

The chair of the panel, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, said none of the judges had “ever read anything like this before” in his speech at the Man Booker dinner last night.

Appiah compared the challenge of reading such a novel with climbing the highest mountain in Wales: “It is definitely worth it because the view is terrific when you get to the top.”

The Guardian’s Claire Armitstead also had praise for the choice, saying it’s unlikely to cheer up booksellers but definitely shows a rejection of the status quo.

And you can see what Burns herself had to say about the novel in an interview on the Man Booker website.