Anna Burns met a reporter at a Belfast hotel. She placed a wooden board on her seat to ease nerve damage from surgery in July 2014. The injury delayed completion of her Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman by two years. Burns won the prize seven years ago for that book.

She manages pain with physiotherapy and personal methods, avoiding regular painkillers. Burns recently started operations with a specialist. The condition limits her writing time to half her previous capacity.

Burns wrote a 5,000-word essay addressing the surgery damage. She works on three projects: two fiction and one non-fiction. She follows the energy in her writing process, shifting between pieces.

Burns grew up in Ardoyne, north Belfast. Her father and neighbour Colette Meek were shot in 1980. Her father survived; Meek, a 47-year-old mother of four, died from a stray bullet during an IRA attack on an RUC patrol outside her home on August 17.

Friends Sean McBride, 18, and Sean Campbell, 19, died in a 1977 Loyalist bomb hidden in a wreath at a chapel. John Savage, 17, was shot by paratroopers in December 1976 while unarmed in a car. His family received a British Ministry of Defence settlement in 2025.

Burns's family was evacuated to Finner Army camp in Co Donegal for three months in August 1969 when Catholics were burned out of homes at the start of the Troubles. She now lives in Cushendun, an Antrim coastal village.