Eimear McBride (born 16 April 1976) is an Irish novelist, whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing , won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. [1] [2]
Eimear McBride (born 16 April 1976) is an Irish novelist, whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing , won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. [1] [2]
McBride wrote A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing in 6 months, but it took nine years to get it published. Galley Beggar Press of Norwich finally picked it up in 2013. [3] The novel is written as a stream-of-consciousness and recounts the story of a young woman's complex relationship with her family. [4]
McBride's second novel The Lesser Bohemians was published on 1 September 2016. [5] Set in Camden Town in the 1990s, it tells the story of the turbulent relationship between an 18-year-old drama student and a 38-year-old actor. McBride discussed the book on Woman's Hour on 8 September [6] and it was reviewed on BBC Radio 4's programme Saturday Review on 17 September. [7]
She has contributed forewords to the Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova (Folio Society), Sundog: the lyrics of Scott Walker (Faber & Faber) [8] and Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy (Faber/ FSG). [9] [10] Her short stories have appeared in The Guardian , Prospect magazine, The Long Gaze Back (Little Island Press), Dubliners 100 (Tramp Press), Winter Papers (Curlew Editions) and on BBC Radio 4. [11] [12] [13]
In 2017 McBride was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. [14] [15]
McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 to Irish parents, both of whom were nurses. The family moved back to Ireland when she was three. [16] [17] She spent her childhood in Tubbercurry in County Sligo and Castlebar, County Mayo. She recalled writing from the age of seven or eight. [18] At the age of 17, McBride moved to London to begin her studies at The Drama Centre, but realised after graduating that she had no interest in becoming an actress.
McBride has a love for Russian literature and spent four months in Saint Petersburg in 2000. On her return, she worked as an office temp and travelled. [18] She completed her first novel during this time. In 2006, she returned to Cork for a time and began work on her second novel. McBride moved to London in 2017 with her husband and daughter after spending several years living in Norwich.
The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. They, along with the Hawthornden Prize, are Britain's oldest literary awards. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, United Kingdom, the prizes were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats Black in memory of her late husband, James Tait Black, a partner in the publishing house of A & C Black Ltd. Prizes are awarded in three categories: Fiction, Biography and Drama.
Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting".
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Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
Joseph O'Neill is an Irish novelist and non-fiction writer. O'Neill's novel Netherland was awarded the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.
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The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize is a British literary prize established in 1963 in tribute to Geoffrey Faber, founder and first Chairman of the publisher Faber & Faber. It recognises a single volume of poetry or fiction by a United Kingdom, Irish or Commonwealth author under 40 years of age on the date of publication, and is in alternating years awarded to poetry and fiction.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Lucy Caldwell is a Northern Irish playwright and novelist. She was the winner of the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award and of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize.
The Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award is an annual award for Irish authors of fiction, established in 1995. It was previously known as the Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year Award (1995–2000), the Kerry Ingredients Irish Fiction Award (2001–2002), and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award (2003-2011).
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2013.
The Goldsmiths Prize is a British literary award, founded in 2013 by Goldsmiths, University of London, in association with the New Statesman. It is awarded annually to a piece of fiction that "breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form." It is limited to citizens and residents of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and to novels published by presses based in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner receives £10,000. Tim Parnell of the Goldsmiths English department conceived and runs the prize, inspired by his research into Laurence Sterne and other eighteenth-century writers, like Denis Diderot, who experimented with the novel form. The prize "casts its net wider than most other prizes" and intends to celebrate "creative daring," but resists the phrase "experimental fiction," because it implies "an eccentric deviation from the novel’s natural concerns, structures and idioms." To date, Rachel Cusk is the author best represented on the prize's shortlists, having been shortlisted for each book of her Outline trilogy.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2014.
Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is the debut novel of Eimear McBride published in 2013.
Hermione Eyre is a British journalist, novelist, and former child actor.
The Lesser Bohemians is the second novel by Eimear McBride. It was published on 1 September 2016 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2017.
Sara Baume is an Irish novelist. She was named on Granta magazine's "Best of Young British Novelists" list 2023.
Jo Baker is a British writer. She is the author of six novels, including the bestselling Longbourn, a New York Times Notable Book, in development as a feature film with Random House Films and StudioCanal. She has also written short stories for BBC Radio 4 and reviews for The Guardian and The New York Times Book Review. In 2018, she was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Queen's University Belfast, and she is currently an Honorary Fellow at Lancaster University.
Outline is a novel by Rachel Cusk, the first in a trilogy known as The Outline trilogy, which also contains the novels Transit and Kudos. It was chosen by The New York Times critics as one of the 15 remarkable books by women that are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." The New Yorker has called the novel "autobiographical fiction."
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