Anna Burns’s Man Booker prize is more than a fairytale – it’s a lesson

“I’ve got 30 days to declare a change in circumstance and this is one hell of a change”, said the writer Anna Burns during a news interview about winning the Man Booker prize for Milkman. The novel is about a teenage girl living in an unnamed Northern Irish city during the Troubles, who is being pursued by an older paramilitary dubbed the Milkman – and Burns managed to write it in chronic pain, while on benefits. The £50,000 prize would help to clear her debts, she said. In the acknowledgements, she thanked her local food bank, housing charity and the Department for Work and Pensions, as well as other governmental and non-governmental bodies set up to help people in poverty. If there were to be a Booker winner to blow Julian Barnes’s description of the Booker as “posh bingo” out of the water, this is it.

Burns’s win will give hope to other poor artists, especially those struggling and skint, with no connections, who went to crap schools or are suffering rubbish circumstances – stuck with “shit life syndrome” in other words. What a symbol of the times we live in, that a woman who was forced to rely on food banks to survive has won the most prestigious literary prize in the country.

We hear so much about the cultural sector being dominated by upper-middle class tastemakers, some of them horrendous snobs, many of whom know each other. And there is truth to this: it is a tiny bubble. But Burns shows you can be radically different and still burst the bubble open.

The author gives hope to her left-behind community, too. “She was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth and had no advantages bestowed upon her. This honestly is brilliant, it’s just so great for people from north Belfast, in a place that lacks hope, to see one of our own do so well,” said fellow writer Lyra McKee, who went to the same school. Her win is timely for all sorts of reasons – the #MeToo movement, Brexit reviving the prospect of a hard border in Northern Ireland – but what I find most moving is buried in those words: the notion that things like this don’t normally happen to “people like us”. It’s true, they don’t.

Perhaps this is why the reception to the news in some quarters has been bizarre. Milkman has been branded a difficult book. It isn’t. It’s written how many people speak. To a normal reader, from a normal background, it reads like a girl from school trotting alongside you down the road, telling you a story. Often, there is an implication that people who are disadvantaged can’t cope with literary fiction. Milkman turns this on its head: if you went to public school, didn’t grow up in a working-class community and only read a certain type of novel, then yes, you might find it difficult – opaque, even. “I couldn’t put it down and I was brought up on a council estate. That may be the point,” wrote one reader to this newspaper. “The embattled working-class community and the mock-heroic demotic are done brilliantly.” As is so often the case in Britain, whether you get Milkman or not could be a class thing.

The rags-to-riches nature of Burns’s story is the good news many of us need and it is appealing to the media for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, I am wary of it being romanticised as an “artist starving in garret” narrative – more La Bohème than I, Daniel Blake. There are already people calling Burns a scrounger, even though the idea that, in this day and age you could simply sign on to pursue your art without drawing the attention of the authorities, is divorced from reality. This isn’t the 1980s or even the 90s, which gave birth to so much cultural brilliance for precisely that reason (Jarvis Cocker once said that Pulp wouldn’t exist without the dole: well, he’s paid the public purse back and then some). These days, it’s more along the lines of: “You can lift a paintbrush, you say? We’ll put you to work picking asparagus. Never mind that you don’t have any legs, you can drag yourself along the ground as you go.”

Let those people moan. It’s a symptom of how often creativity is seen as an indulgence until it pays off. If it’s not part of the market, it doesn’t matter. We forget how many people use it as a tool to survive, if not financially, then emotionally, for their mental health; how they squeeze it in around everything else. According to the Society of Authors, the average full-time writer earns £5.73 an hour, less than minimum wage. People write for reasons other than money, and always have. The publishing industry is making great efforts to improve access to working-class writers and the writers themselves, such as Kit de Waal, are speaking up courageously and demanding to be seen. Burns’s win adds more fuel to the fire.

Milkman has become a top seller on Amazon, and Faber has now printed more than 150,000 copies. It may read like a fairytale, but it’s also a lesson.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist