Eimear McBride – 27 Nov

Eimear McBride joins the Irish Literary Society to discuss and read from her work. Described by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a writer of remarkable power and originality,’ McBride’s debut A Girl is a Half-formed Thing received the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Her short stories have appeared in Dubliners 100, The Long Gaze Back and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She writes and reviews for the The Guardian, New Statesman and the TLS.

“Blazingly daring…[McBride’s] prose is a visceral throb, and the sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words, freed from the tedious march of sequence, seem to want to merge with one another, as paint and musical notes can. The results are thrilling, and also thrillingly efficient. The language plunges us into the centre of experiences that are often raw, unpleasant, frightening, but also vital.”James Wood, The New Yorker

Her most recent novel, The Lesser Bohemians, follows a young Irish woman who arrives in London from Ireland in the 1990s, to study drama and falls passionately, dangerously in love with an older actor. The older man has a disturbing past for which the young girl is unprepared and her troubled past becomes apparent. A bold and subversive story about sexual passion, The Lesser Bohemians is also a celebration of love, and how it can both destroy and create. McBride will be in conversation with Shevaun Wilder.

Speaker: Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride was born in 1976 in Liverpool to Northern Irish parents. Aged two she and her family returned to Ireland and her childhood was mostly spent in Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo. At fourteen they moved again to Castlebar, Co Mayo. In 1994, at seventeen, she went to London and spent the next three years studying acting at Drama Centre. Much of her twenties were spent temping and travelling. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. It won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize, was shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014. She moved to Cork in 2006, and Norwich in 2011, where she currently lives with her husband and daughter.