Why Anna Burns, the latest Booker Prize winner, may never write again

Burns is one of the more surprising recent winners of the Booker, one of literature's biggest awards

Anna Burns sounded almost giddy one recent Monday as we sat in a restaurant here in Brighton, on England’s southern coast. The week before she had won the Man Booker Prize for Milkman, her third novel, about an unnamed 18-year-old coerced into a relationship at the height of Northern Ireland’s Troubles. The win wasn’t the only reason for her excitement.

“I can feel I’m on the cusp of something,” she said.

Burns suffers from “lower back and nerve pain,” she said, the result of a botched operation. “Nerves pain,” she suddenly added, correcting herself. “There’s plenty of nerves involved.” Thanks to the