Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride, 2014

Eimear McBride (born 1976 in Liverpool ) is an Irish-British writer. Her debut novel has received five literary prizes in English-speaking countries alone, has been translated into several languages ​​and licensed for more than 20 countries.

Life

McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 to Northern Irish parents; she has three brothers. In 1976 the family moved to Tubbercurry in County Sligo, Ireland . Her father died when she was eight and in 1991 the mother and children moved to Castlebar in County Mayo, western Ireland . At the age of 17, she moved to London in 1994 , where she studied for three years at the drama center . As a 27-year-old, she tried to get her finished novel manuscript A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing , which she wrote in just six months, to various publishers. For years this was unsuccessful, because although the editors praised the linguistic and content-related qualities, they shied away from the commercial risk of venturing onto the market with such cross-border issues. Only the independent, small publisher Galley Beggar Press from Norwich brought out the book in June 2013. The onset of the bestseller success overwhelmed the small publisher's capacities, so that a licensed paperback edition was published by the major London-based Faber & Faber Verlag in April 2014 .

Juror Gaby Wood called the book "so linguistically bold, so perfectly formed and at the same time so heart-stirringly strong" ("so linguistically daring, so formally skillful yet so heart-churningly strong") that the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2013 should go to her.

The author, who won the first Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, was appointed to the four-member jury of the literature prize in 2015. Her title The Lesser Bohemians was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2016.

McBride is married and has lived in Norwich with his husband and daughter since 2011 .

A girl is a half-formed thing

The book describes the development of a pair of siblings from poor childhood to adulthood. The narrator's brother suffers from a brain tumor from an early age; she tries to protect him. The parents are violent towards their offspring. The whole thing is portrayed in a kind of stream of consciousness à la James Joyce . The language has "musicality", the author has several pitches and tempos. The German translation by Miriam Mandelkow does not differ from the original.

The author herself named Joyce and Edna O'Brien as major influences on her perception of what language and literature can do.

The literary critic John Sutherland firmly denies that Joyce's concept of the stream of consciousness is applicable to McBride's debut novel. James Wood, literary critic of the New Yorker , noted that the book's originality was not in its style, but in the use McBride made of that style.

The book was quickly adapted for the theater. A stage version by Annie Ryan was performed at both the 2014 Dublin Theater Festival and the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe .

Works

• A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing , Galley Beggar Press, Norwich 2013.
  • The girl a half-finished thing , novel, from the English by Miriam Mandelkow , Schöffling & Co. , Frankfurt am Main 2015. 256 pages ISBN 978-3-89561-292-3
  • Une fille est une chose à demi , Buchet Chastel 2015.
• The Lesser Bohemians . Faber, 2016

Awards

• 2013 winner of the Goldsmiths Prize for A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
• 2013 winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
• 2014 Folio Prize shortlist for A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
• 2014 winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
• 2014 winner of the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award for A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
• 2014 winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize for novel firstlings for A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
• 2014 Shortlist of the International Dylan Thomas Prize
• 2014 Shortlist of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Category: Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction)
• 2017 winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Lesser Bohemians

Web links

• Literature by and about Eimear McBride in the catalog of the German National Library
• Eimear McBride at the Guardian
• A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride - review by Anne Enright in the Guardian on September 20, 2013
• Angela Schader: Eimear McBride's debut novel. Hellishly close to the body , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , November 3, 2015

Footnotes

1. ↑ according to national libraries : French, German, Dutch, Polish
2. ↑ ^{a b} Book profile at Verlag Schöffling & Co. ( Memento of the original from 23 August 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Interview with Eimear McBride on thewhitereview.org , May 2014, accessed February 5, 2017
4. ↑ Author profile E. McBride ( Memento of the original from 23 August 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from Galley Beggar Press  
5. ↑ Eimear McBride wins Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize , The Irish Times November 21, 2014, accessed August 17, 2015
6. ↑ Eimear McBride announced as judge for the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize , New Statesman, January 22, 2015, accessed August 23, 2015
7. ↑ Biographical theater conversation with E. McBride in June 2015 , The Hawk's Well Theater, Sligo, accessed August 23, 2015
8. ↑ Debut of Eimear McBride: Unheard of old-fashioned and avant-garde modern , review in Deutschlandfunk on August 16, 2015
9. ^ In praise of Edna O'Brien, by Eimear McBride , The Irish Times, March 7, 2015
10. ↑ My hero: Eimear McBride on James Joyce , The Guardian, June 6, 2014
11. ↑ Eimear McBride's novel doesn't fit any terms we use to categorize writing , The Guardian, June 6, 2014
12. ↑ Useless Prayers - Eimear McBride's "A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing." , The New Yorker, September 29, 2014, accessed August 23, 2015
13. ↑ The Corn Exchange Theater Company's stage version performed at the Samuel Beckett Theater Dublin, The Guardian, September 30, 2014, accessed August 23, 2015
14. ↑ Edinburgh Fringe 2015 Program: A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing , The Guardian, 6 August 2015
15. ↑ Debut novelist Eimear McBride wins £ 10,000 prize , London Evening Standard, November 13, 2013, accessed August 17, 2015
16. ↑ The 2014 Folio Prize Shortlist is Announced , Folio Prize website dated February 10, 2014
17. ^ Folio Prize 2013: The Americans are coming, but not the ones we were expecting , The Daily Telegraph of February 10, 2014
18. ↑ Debut Irish novelist wins Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction , Washington Post, June 4, 2014, accessed January 9, 2016
19. ↑ Eimear McBride wins € 15,000 Kerry Group Irish novel of the year award , The Irish Times, May 28, 2014, accessed August 17, 2015
20. ↑ The 2014 Desmond Elliott Prize ( Memento of the original from July 25, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Website of the award from July 3, 2014, accessed August 17, 2015 (English)  
21. ↑ International Dylan Thomas prize unveils 'extraordinarily strong' shortlist , The Guardian, September 5, 2014
22. ↑ 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winners & Finalists ( Memento of the original from August 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , LATimes, accessed August 23, 2015