Eimear McBride

McBride was born in Liverpool to Irish parents who returned to Ireland when she was three, and grew up in Sligo and Mayo before moving to London at seventeen to train as an actor at the Drama Centre.

She wrote A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing at twenty-seven in six months, then spent nine years failing to find a publisher willing to take its broken, Joycean syntax before the small press Galley Beggar Press finally did in 2013.

The novel won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize, the Women's Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Ireland's Kerry Group Novel of the Year in short order, a delayed vindication after nearly a decade of rejection.