Eimear McBride on A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Eimear McBride speaks about winning the Baileys Prize for her experimental novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing.
When debut novelist Eimear McBride won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction -- formerly known as Orange -- on June 4 2014, the book world was stunned that she had beaten known quantities Donna Tartt and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. But perhaps no one was as surprised as McBride herself.
Her novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, experiments with syntax and is stylistically indebted to James Joyce, which makes it difficult to read at first. As she told the Telegraph's Gaby Wood, she didn't think Baileys, the prize's new sponsor, would want to be associated with such a book. But her win has done something on behalf of committed readers everywhere: expanded the idea of what mainstream fiction can be. As Professor Mary Beard, who was one of the judges, later put it: "accessible" doesn't mean "easy".
Before it was picked up by the tiny independent publisher Galley Beggar Press (it was only the second book they'd ever published),
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing had been turned down for almost a decade, by more publishers than McBride can count. When she met us, the morning after her triumph, at the offices of her paperback publishers Faber and Faber, McBride explained how she became a novelist -- and why, after so much rejection, she never gave up.
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