Who won the National Book Award for fiction last year? Who cares?

In America, literary prizes are greeted with the same enthusiasm as a low Steelers draft choice. Not so in the British Isles, where the $98,000 Man Booker Fiction Prize can even push Amy Winehouse off the front page -- at least for a day.

The atmosphere around the award approaches sports-championship proportions, with London bookies posting the ever-changing odds on the nominees. Then, in October when the winner is announced live on the BBC TV evening news, somebody always gets ticked off.

The selection of Anne Enright's novel "The Gathering" raised a few howls of pain around literary circles because the 45-year-old not only defeated favorite Ian McEwan, but she is Irish to boot.

		Anne Enright speaks at 8 p.m. Thursday at the Kresge Theater on Carlow's Oakland campus. Tickets are $8; 412-578-6346.

Called a "rank outsider" in the British press because the odds of her winning were 12-1, Enright emerged with her integrity and sense of humor intact.

Talking by phone from her home in Bray, a village 30 miles south of Dublin, the novelist seemed relieved that the brouhaha was over and that she could get on with her work.

"A lot of the controversy out of the Booker was froth. I waited to see if it had any real content to it, but it turned out to be froth," she said.

The author of five quietly received novels and a quirky "how-to" book on babies (she's the mother of two), Enright was suddenly a "celebrity," making her a prime target for barbs.

Adding to the noise was Enright's essay critical of the McCanns, a British couple whose child vanished while they were vacation. It was strongly attacked in the press.

"The attention took some getting used to," she said, "and some mornings, I would wake up and think, 'I've won the Booker!' I don't think that's a long-term way to live. I know that the attention has nothing to do with me. It would be lovely to believe it, but it's not true."

In her own country, accepting the prize is seen as a patriotic gesture, Enright said.

"Everyone in Ireland thinks you're winning prizes for Ireland. I can't walk down the street without somebody congratulating me and telling me how proud they are of me. I don't know how to meet it."

For some time, Enright has stayed close to home, following a routine that frees up part of her day for writing. Her husband, Martin Murphy, artistic director of a theater company, takes their children, 4 and 7, to school in the morning and she picks them up in the afternoon.

"Which gives me exactly 20 minutes to write, since by the time I've really got started, I only have 20 minutes till I get the kids," she laughed.

But, "The Gathering's" success has changed the domestic tranquility in Bray, sending Enright on a wide-ranging book tour that stops in Pittsburgh Thursday at Carlow University.

It's a reunion of sorts. Enright has taught in Carlow's summer writing program held, of course, in Carlow, Ireland.

"I've been doing workshops at Carlow for three years," she said. "It's been very invigorating and enjoyable."

Her Pittsburgh visit will also reunite her with Dan and Patricia Rooney of the Clan Steelers, who established the Rooney Prize for Fiction in 1976. It's awarded to Irish writers under 40 years old.

Enright's first book, the 1991 short-story collection, "The Portable Virgin," won that prize, giving her career a push.

"I was just a 'baby' writer at the time and I never heard of the Rooneys or the Steelers. The check was very nice and they gave me a Steeler hat and shirt. I hadn't a clue about American football."

Enright also received a tip on Pittsburgh from fellow Irish writer and friend Roddy Doyle, who spoke here last month: "Bring gloves."

In Doyle's talk at the Heinz Lectures series, he described a modern Ireland of full employment and a "post-Christian" attitude about religion. It's a different picture than the one of the poverty and Catholicism depicted in the Frank McCourt world of "Angela's Ashes."

Will economic success spoil Irish fiction?

"Some writers including Roddy like the fact that Ireland's changed," Enright said. "I'm usually thought of in the same way, a contemporary writer, so my friends were asking me about 'The Gathering,' 'Why is it so miserable? It's all over now, the poverty and the suffering.'

"My point is that the novel is about it being over in Ireland. The heroine owns a stainless steel German dishwasher and lives in a house of limestone," Enright said.

"My novel deals with the transitions in Ireland, two really, since it covers a broad sweep of history from 1925 to pretty much the present. I write about how Ireland found respectability after the 1920s and now, how it's found financial stability.

"What is sad about 'The Gathering' are what was left behind and the people who didn't make it through."

What's ahead for Enright is a new collection of short stories, four of which have been published in the New Yorker magazine recently. Titled "Yesterday's Weather," it will be published in the United States this fall.