Her first novel,
No Bones, is an account of a girl's life growing up in Belfast during
the Troubles. The dysfunctional family in the novel symbolizes the Northern Ireland political situation.
No Bones won the 2001
Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize presented by the
Royal Society of Literature for the best regional novel of the year in the
United Kingdom and
Ireland. Among the novels that depict the Troubles within the
Literature of Northern Ireland,
No Bones is considered an important work and has been compared to
Dubliners by
James Joyce for capturing the
Belfast population's everyday language. Her second novel,
Little Constructions, was published in 2007 by Fourth Estate (an imprint of
HarperCollins). It is a darkly comic and ironic tale centred on a woman from a tightly knit family of criminals on a mission of retribution. In 2018, Burns won the
Booker Prize for her third novel
Milkman, making her the first Northern Irish writer to win the award. After the ceremony,
Graywolf Press announced that it would publish
Milkman in the U.S. on 11 December 2018. In 2021, she was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). ==Bibliography==