Novelist Eimear McBride on her work and getting it published

Eimear McBride is an Irish novelist whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. She wrote the book in six months, but it took nine years to get it published. Galley Beggar Press of Norwich finally picked it up in 2013. The novel is written in a stream of consciousness-like style and tells the story of a young woman's complex relationship with her family.

McBride's second novel The Lesser Bohemians was published in September 2016. Set in Camden Town in the 1990s, it tells the story of the turbulent relationship between an eighteen year old drama student and a thirty-eight year old actor.

In 2017 McBride was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading.

We met in Montreal - where she was, at the invitation of the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University - to talk about her work, and her experience getting it published.