Eimear McBride has won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

Irish author Eimear McBride has won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction with her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.

McBride spent nearly a decade trying to get the novel published. The novel tells the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother afflicted by a childhood brain tumour.

At the ceremony in London last night, McBride picked up the £30,000 prize and thanked her publisher, Galley Beggar Press in Norwich, for publishing the book after years of rejection. 

McBride fought off fierce competition from the other authors on the shortlist. But the book impressed the judges who described it as "ambitious" and "amazing". 

Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlist:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Fourth Estate)

• Hannah Kent, Burial Rites (Picador)

• Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Bloomsbury)

• Audrey Magee, The Undertaking (Atlantic Books)

• Eimear McBride, A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing (Galley Beggar/Faber and Faber)

• Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little, Brown)

McBride wrote the novel nine years ago when she was just 27, but it was rejected by publishers for being too experimental. It was in 2011, after McBride moved to Norwich, that she sent her manuscript the newly formed Galley Beggar Press, who published it in 2013.



Source: BBC NewsImage: Shutterhacks, Flickr