Debut novelist Eimear McBride has won the £30,000 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction only a week after winning the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

Hilary Mantel said she was left “weak at the knees” after becoming the first British writer to win the Man Booker Prize for Fiction twice after her novel Bring up the Bodies was named the best book of the year.

IT’S a political memoir with celebrity trappings — secrecy, security, controversy and a multi-million-dollar deal.