She worked odd jobs – in a friend’s Celtic jewellery shop, for one – until writing came to her. Thinking about those reactions kickstarted Milkman, she says.īurns moved to London when she was 25 to study Russian at Queen Mary College, but dropped out. “Complete strangers would say to me, ‘You’re that girl who walks and reads’ or ‘I saw you on the something road reading.’ And I thought, ‘Why would they comment on it? Am I that noticeable?’” “I’d always have a book in my bag, even if it was a clutch and I was made up to go clubbing.” But her habit of walking while reading soon became a source of local bafflement.

She couldn’t have been more upset when she was sent back to school.īurns’ aunt turned her onto reading by making her go to the library, she says. The soldiers at the refugee camp south of the border in the Republic of Ireland, where she and her family were sent, brought her more food than she had seen before, she says. In 1969, Ardoyne was evacuated because homes were getting burned down. And then of course they’d be bloodstains all over the place.” She remembers petrol bombs being stacked at the entrances to certain areas and riots on her way to and from school. “Just adults fighting in the street with each other over anything, and children fighting and dogs biting anybody. “There was an awful lot of violence, shocking amount of violence, apart from the Troubles,” Burns says when asked about her childhood. (A writer and former senior member of Sinn Fein dismissed her debut novel, No Bones, as a “misanthropic portrayal of the nationalist people” of Ardoyne.) The Troubles started when she was six, and that forms the backdrop for her novels. “I’d go over to the house so I had all that rowdiness, which was important, then I’d go back to my aunt’s for the quietness,” she says. She lived with her aunt across the road from her parents and six siblings. He read it in a bad Ulster accent.īurns denies “Middle Sister” is her – “All we share is the reading while walking,” she says – but it is easy for a reader to jump to conclusions based on Burns’s life story.īurns, 56, grew up in a working class family in Ardoyne, a mainly Roman Catholic district of Belfast. “There are moments when I had to read it out loud, just for the pleasure of it, the way it sounds,” he said. But Milkman also stood out thanks to Burns’s unique voice.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the chairman of this year’s Booker judges, said its focus on men abusing power and what happens when rumours spiral out of control gave it wide resonance.

Anna burns the milkman