Baileys Women’s Prize goes to Eimear McBride

This year’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction has gone to Eimear McBride for her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. The book has already won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award and the Goldsmiths Prize, is nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize and has been shortlisted for the inaugural Folio Prize. McBride took the Baileys over presumed favourite Donna Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch, as well as similarly big names Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jhumpa Lahiri and fellow first-time novelists Hannah Kent and Audrey Magee (not to mention the longlisted Margaret Atwood, Rachel Kushner and Eleanor Catton). The book’s triumph is a major coup for its original publisher, the small Norwich independent Galley Beggar Press, for which it was a launch title (it was subsequently picked up for paperback by Faber & Faber).

Accepting the award, McBride said: ‘I hope it will serve as an incentive to publishers everywhere to take a look at difficult books and think again. We are all writers but we are all readers first. There is a contract between publishers and readers which must be honoured, readers can not be underestimated.’ It took McBride nine years to find a publisher willing to take on her innovatively-styled manuscript, having written the novel a decade ago, aged 27.

Former MD of Penguin Helen Fraser, head of a judging panel comprised of Mary Beard, Caitlin Moran, Denise Mina and Sophie Raworth, told The Guardian: ‘Very early on Eimear stood out from the crowd. We all put ourselves into purdah to re-read the shortlisted books but it was only when we started cautiously exchanging emails in the past week that we realised what a strong contender it was. It took us one hour to get the shortlist down to two books, and the remaining three hours to decide between them – but this is a truly worthy winner.’

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