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'It's very hard to spend most of your adult life feeling like a failure.'

14 July 2014

‘I think they (the judges) were excited by the language and by the emotional impact of the story. They must have been looking for something different because certainly the book isn't written in a conventional way...

Being a writer who was not published for nearly ten years isn't a great path. It's very hard to spend most of your adult life feeling like a failure...

(Mainstream publishers) seem to think readers are passive, and that being a reader is the same as being a TV viewer, but it isn't. The constant regurgitation - "This was successful so let's have a bit more of it - has a very deadening effect on literature.'

Eimear McBride, winner of the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction with her debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.