Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride is an Irish novelist born in Liverpool in 1976 and raised in the west of Ireland. Her debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing was written over six months in 2004 but took a decade to find a publisher, eventually appearing with small press Galley Beggar in 2013. It went on to win the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2014. Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians (2016), also published by Faber, won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2016, making her the only author to have won that prize for two different novels. The novel follows a young Irish drama student navigating London and a complicated relationship with an older actor. Her third novel, Strange Hotel (2020), is a more compressed work exploring a woman's inner life through anonymous hotel stays. McBride's prose style draws on the stream-of-consciousness techniques of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, employing fractured syntax and interior monologue to render consciousness as it forms. She has written extensively about the influence of Joyce on her work.