IRISH author Eimear McBride, who spent nine years trying to get her debut novel published, has won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.
McBride, who was raised in Tubbercurry and Castlebar, collected the £30,000 prize at a ceremony at Royal Festival Hall in London last night.
Helen Fraser, chair of the judging panel and a former managing director of Penguin Books, hailed McBride’s book as “the beginning of a major career".
"It is an amazing book. Publishers do make mistakes, and I can only imagine that some may have read the first two or three pages and thought, 'No, this is too difficult.'
“But once you get beyond that, we found it utterly engaging, readable, un-put-down-able,” said Fraser.
McBride told the BBC Breakfast Show this morning that she was “delighted” with the award and that she had not expected to triumph against such a strong shortlist, which included Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Donna Tartt.
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing tells the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother and the shadow cast by his suffering from a brain tumour as a child.
The experimental work follows the unnamed female narrator from the womb until the age of 20.
Asked about the inspiration behind the 771-page book’s style, which features the fast-paced and comma free voice of her narrator, McBride said:
“I’m a big fan of James Joyce and really inspired by his use of language and his way of making language work in a different fashion to create different kinds of effect for the reader.”
The 37-year-old stressed that A Girl is a Half-formed Thing was a work of fiction and not a memoir, although she spoke briefly of the personal angle behind the story.
“I lost a brother to cancer, to a brain tumour, so that was a beginning point for me. But the book isn’t about him,” McBride added.
The writer said she had expected to have finished her follow up this year, but this is now likely to be published next year adding:
“It’s the inside out of a A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.”
McBride adds the accolade to her Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, which the writer won at last week’s Listowel Writers’ Week along with €15,000.
