Irish debut author Eimear McBride has won the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction with her first novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. the novel has also won the inaugural Goldsmith’s Prize, and was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2014 and the Desmond Elliott Prize 2014.
Helen Fraser, Chair of Judges, said: “An amazing and ambitious first novel that impressed the judges with its inventiveness and energy. This is an extraordinary new voice – this novel will move and astonish the reader.”
About the book
Eimear McBride’s debut tells the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. It is not so much a stream of consciousness as an unconsciousness railing against a life that makes little sense, forming a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a young and isolated protagonist.
About the author
Eimear McBride was born in 1976 to Northern Irish parents. She moved to the UK aged 17 and spent the next three years studying acting at Drama Centre London. Aged 27 she wrote her first novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing in six months, and thereafter spent the next decade trying to get it published. During this period she relocated back to Ireland and spent four years living in Cork City.
In 2011 she moved to Norwich, and it was there that she met Galley Beggar Press who would go on to publish A Girl is a Half-formed Thing in June 2013.
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