For Irish writers language is an aspect of performance, of self-display; it is carried in cultural baggage and shrouded in white silence. And yet the great tradition Irish writers have inherited for their use includes the full body of English literature which they feel free to adapt, play with, usurp, mimic and make their own. No one in Ireland writes a sentence without all of this lurking in the shadows. Anne Enright, the 2007 Booker Prize Winner, and Colm Tóibín, the 2006 winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, visit Zócalo to tease out and torture these cultural questions.
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