Writer gets two awards in 2 weeks for debut novel

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.

The writer beat big names, including novelist Donna Tartt when she was announced the winner at a ceremony in London for A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing.

The novel, which is the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour, was written in six months but was initially rejected by every publisher to whom she sent it. Ms McBride put the novel away for a decade after it was rejected as too experimental, before a small publisher in her adopted home town of Norwich published it.