“I’m in a bit of a lull,” Anne Enright says when I ask what she’s working on. “You wait for a catch, a snag to your interest.

“The wonderful Annie Dillard has a story about an Inuit woman who has a baby to feed and no fish, so she slices tiny bits of her own thigh as bait. ‘This is what a writer does,’ she says. That’s Annie Dillard, though, not me.”

But the New Yorker magazine recently published Enright’s short story The Bridge Stood Fast, and Jonathan Cape a brilliant career retrospective of her nonfiction, Attention, reflecting on her life, writers and art, and Ireland and the world, so she has been not idle but taking stock.

“I’m in a lull because of the world, probably also because my parents are both gone – and the family home. I’m trying to recalibrate after a long decade of elder care for me and my siblings.”

Enright’s mother, Cora, died in November 2023, her father, Donal, in June 2016, a few months before Donald Trump was first elected US president.

“I lost a wonderful man from my life while the world gained a terrible one,” she wrote in an essay in No Authority, a collection from 2019 of her writings as the inaugural laureate of Irish fiction, in which she addressed, among other things, misogyny and male privilege. “I knew many good men and very few bad ones. Was this male goodness also illusory? What, I wondered, came between these individual, well-intentioned men and the wider enactment of equality?”

She reprises the subject in fictional form in her New Yorker story. “Even though the story is set in the 1980s, you want to feel it is saying something relevant to now. The world is so different, you want to meet that change in some way. The story is very strongly based on me going down to Clare with my dad, picking blackberries and mushrooms. I wanted to capture that fantastic thing of having your dad all to yourself when you were 11. Any girl who is stuck on their da, I had access to that easily.”

[ Anne Enright: ‘People that go around complaining they don’t win prizes … I always think of Trump and Georgia’Opens in new window ]

In the story, the father suddenly has to leave, and a darker masculinity takes centre stage. It asks, if men are more or less good, how did we get saddled with such a damaged patriarchy? There is also an undercurrent of Ireland’s urban-rural divide.

Enright once found the New Yorker’s fiction editors “almost anti-voice”, wanting to turn colourful sentences beige, but she has always admired its editing as “a lesson in clarity, foregrounding things the reader needs to know”, one she passes on to her students at University College Dublin, where she is professor of creative writing. “Don’t be hiding things under your jumper. There’s something you’re not telling.”

I realised that the people who didn’t like you weren’t going to like you because you won the Booker: they were going to dislike you more — Anne Enright

Enright has enjoyed consistent critical success since her debut short-story collection, The Portable Virgin, from 1991, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Winning the Booker Prize, with The Gathering, from 2005, made her name internationally. “It was fantastic timing. It very much did its job for me.” She didn’t think she had written a Booker winner. “I was rearing small kids and locked away for a few hours a day in Bray.