Anne Enright wins Man Booker 2007

Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962 and educated in Dublin, Canada and at the University of East Anglia, on the Creative Writing course taught by Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury.

For six years, she was a television producer and director in Dublin, and is now a frequent broadcaster on Radio 4 and RTE; she also writes for the London Review of Books and the Irish Times.

She is married to the actor Martin Murphy and has contributed a chapter to the Irish group novel Finbar's Hotel. Her first two books were a novel, The Wig my Father Wore, and The Portable Virgin, a collection of stories that won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. What Are You Like? is published next week by Jonathan Cape.

The first time I heard Anne Enright, she was reading a story about a woman selling handbags who gets obsessed with matching bags and customers. It was achingly funny and tragic. Every sentence was electric, hilarious, upsetting. "Jesus!" I said to her editor. "Yes," he said proudly.

I'm in Dublin to talk about her new novel, What Are You Like? (Jonathan Cape, pounds 10); Anne suggests doing so in the Museum of Modern Art. She is small, with dark bright eyes. The word "elfin" could hover round a description of her but she's so funny and dead against pretension it wouldn't dare to touch her.

Ever since that handbag riff, one thing I've loved her work for is the way it presents physical objects with upset hilarity. So a roll of ham on a plate looms ever more disturbingly at her characters, who despair of dealing with it, or after a while even of seeing it adequately.

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"I like to fetishise objects," she says as she drives me through Dublin streets. "I find if you stare at them long enough they become - funny. You stop being able to `read' them."

Her new characters have a terrible time with objects and choosing. One shoplifts; another is utterly lost in the physical world. "In the English novel," says Anne, "people's possessions imply class judgements which point to how their emotions will run.

In Ireland it's different. There's plenty of snobbery but it hasn't been much about things: because there wasn't the choice. For years, there were only three shops where you could buy sofas! A lot of people don't know how to buy. I didn't. When I first got money as a television producer, I'd buy clothes my script-writer laughed at."

Anne is researching new Dublin neighbourhoods as she drives. More problems of choice: she wants to move house. "I think we go right here," she murmurs, turning left.

Anne? "Oh, was that left? I fell on my head when little. I think it affected my left and right. My husband says, Do you mean left? Or your left?"

If her left and right are unique, so are her novels. The lunatic landscape of material choice is a new subject for the Irish novel. Is she influenced by American writing - especially, say, Don DeLillo? "All the Americans. DeLillo's White Noise is fantastic.

The short story writers: Maeve Brennan lived in the toilets of The New Yorker for the last years of her life and did wonderful stuff."

In the Museum, she shows me Kathy Prendergast's pieces: some of human hair, one a baby's jumper whose chest rises with a hidden motor. Anne is expecting her first baby in June. "I much prefer looking at female artists," she says.

"I get more of an echo. Dorothy Cross does even more disruptive work, very funny teats on cowskin ironing boards! In her studio, Martin laughed so hard she gave him one of those!"

But it's Prendergast's knitted sculpture of two heads, like Siamese twins, that we're here for. Anne's new novel is about twins lost to each other. "I started with a woman convinced there was another version of herself walking the world.

Then I saw I had to make the facts as large as the story. This woman thought there was a version of herself out there. I had to make it real. It became a book about how things get buried." The father gives away one twin without telling anyone. "How do decisions on that scale get made? I knew he would never understand what he'd done, so I had to put all the revelation, and misery, outside."

We tramp through sculptured furniture with kilts of human hair and sit in the cafe. Anne shoots a venomous glance at a visitor lighting up at the smoking table: she has given up for the baby. These twins, I say. They have a terrible time.

But they're identical, so why are their terrible times so different? Anne crumbles squares of chocolate to take her mind off fags. "It's not the book's function to give pat reasons like nature versus nurture. The girls have their own problems.

That cliche - `the characters took over' - well, they did. I had to give in to their lives. Different knowledge is offered them. Rose doesn't go round the world believing in another version of herself: Maria always has."

She's kind about men. "I do do nice men. I'm much more optimistic about them than most people are." But her take on things is female: not a victim stance or an angry one, but a female way of being bewildered in the world. Maria and Rose's sexual investigations are hilariously deadpan and painful.

"Someone said disapprovingly to me, `Do you realise there is sex on every page?' Well, good. I hope I'm not moral as a writer."

At 16, she went to school in Canada, where a teacher opened her eyes to literary sex. "We were doing La Belle Dame Sans Merci. `She made moan,' said the teacher. `Well, we know what that's about!' I was straight from convent school. Poetry and sex? I was outraged. I said, `You've ruined Keats for me!'"

But sex was now part of writing, for ever. "The next thing we did was Pinter's The Homecoming. It was so sexual but existentially. It was an intellectual and literary opening up."

"Such a boys' world, Ireland," I say. "So many male writers, so few women. Does that bother you?"

"What I do is my own. I look at the guys and think, `They're doing something different'." She adds serenely, "if men are foolish you have to use it. You can be frustrated by tokenism.

I'm very rude to people who say they want me on a panel because they'd like a woman's voice. There's a game I play when I'm the only woman: to see if I'm the only person who gets interrupted. I am, every time! They don't do it to each other. But they always do it to me."

And humour? "The irony I use is not literary. It's my mother's. A lived, inherited irony - not from books." She uses some of it on me now. "I really want to write proper books," she says, head cocked among the avant-garde postcards. "I know I'll have to write proper books in the end. But I want to have fun along the way."

She had great fun producing a TV programme called Nighthawks, set in a bar with a TV in it where anything, fictional or real, could happen. "It was like packing to go on holiday every day. I'd wait for the script, have the actors standing by, the props, but you never knew what you were going to need, and you have to book everything in advance. It was anarchic."

"How did you write your first book, then?"

"I'd come home on Friday, go to the pictures, then write all weekend." Ever since, I say, her work has seemed to me to be about the gap between how things feel inside and how they look outside. She agrees. "There's a moment in Caspar Hauser when they point to a tower and tell the guy who's been incarcerated, `That's where you were.' `No!' he says. `It was much bigger. And it was all round me'."

Werner Herzog's film suits her book in other ways too. All her characters would resonate to that line, "What is this terrible screaming which men called silence?" Where did she learn to get this despairing insideness of a person, while staying so outside, so in her own voice?

"I don't know," she says. "I suppose Beckett does it, doesn't he? But you know" - she looks at me, bird head on one side, furiously ignoring the cigarettes over my shoulder - "I only write what I can." But she also writes what only she can.