Award-winning author for Cúirt interview
A public interview featuring Eimear McBride, author of the award-winning novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, promises to be a highlight of this year’s Cúirt Festival.
Eimear waited nine years and suffered countless rejections before the novel – her first – was published in 2013 by independent UK company, Galley Beggar Press. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013.
It also received glowing reviews, with Booker winner Anne Enright describing it as ‘an instant classic’ and ‘an account of Irish girlhood to be set alongside [Edna] O'Brien's The Country Girls for emotional accuracy and verve’.
Eimear was born in Liverpool but grew up Sligo and Mayo where she still has family.
Her book is the story of an unnamed girl growing up in rural Ireland. Emerging from a childhood marked by family illness and a neurotic, pious mother, this girl struggles to grow into womanhood. Having suffered abuse as a teenager she becomes sexually promiscuous and reckless as a student in Dublin.
This book deals with some dark topics, but does so in a unique, poetic style, giving it a moving quality that has impressed readers and critics alike.
• Eimear will be at Cúirt next Thursday, April 10 at 1pm in An Taibhdhearc, when she will be in conversation with author and broadcaster Kathleen MacMahon.