People are full of praise for our decision to publish A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. But it would not have been hard to pass
Dreams and nightmares … Eimear McBride receives her Baileys women's prize. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters
Just over an hour before I started writing this article, I was in the Royal Festival Hall in London. I was drinking champagne watching Eimear McBride win the Baileys women's prize for fiction for A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. And I wasn't dreaming.
Just over a year ago, I was in the Mulberry Tree, a pub around the corner from my house in Norwich (and not that far from Eimear's). I was discussing the final edits with Eimear, together with Eloise Millar and Henry Layte, my co-directors of Galley Beggar Press. At some point in that meeting – as I remember it now, anyway – I said: "You're going to win one whole shit load of prizes." And Eimear looked at me as if I was off in a waking dream.
Every so often, I have actual dreams. Nightmares and daymares. Moments that give me cold sweats. Moments in which I think what if I had said "no"? What if we had failed to publish Girl?
This little book has started to develop its own mythology, now that it has won the Goldsmiths prize, the Kerry Group prize for fiction, the Baileys prize, now that Anne Enright has described it as a work of genius. The story is that Eimear wrote it nine years ago and that just about every publisher in the land turned it down, until plucky little Galley Beggar Press took it on. This legend is – to Eimear's and Galley Beggar's abundant good fortune – a true one.
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Just over a year ago, I was in the Mulberry Tree, a pub around the corner from my house in Norwich (and not that far from Eimear's). I was discussing the final edits with Eimear, together with Eloise Millar and Henry Layte, my co-directors of Galley Beggar Press. At some point in that meeting – as I remember it now, anyway – I said: "You're going to win one whole shit load of prizes." And Eimear looked at me as if I was off in a waking dream.
Every so often, I have actual dreams. Nightmares and daymares. Moments that give me cold sweats. Moments in which I think what if I had said "no"? What if we had failed to publish Girl?
This little book has started to develop its own mythology, now that it has won the Goldsmiths prize, the Kerry Group prize for fiction, the Baileys prize, now that Anne Enright has described it as a work of genius. The story is that Eimear wrote it nine years ago and that just about every publisher in the land turned it down, until plucky little Galley Beggar Press took it on. This legend is – to Eimear's and Galley Beggar's abundant good fortune – a true one.
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