Judge Chris Cleave calls on publishers to support debut fiction, or see 'literature murdered on our watch'
Keeping literature alive … Eimear McBride. Photograph: Teri Pengilley
The prize-winning author Chris Cleave has called on the writers of today to "raise up the next generation of novelists" or "be damned as the ones who let literature be murdered on our watch". Cleave was speaking as he announced Eimear McBride's debut A Girl is a Half-formed Thing as winner of the Desmond Elliott prize for the year's best first novel.
McBride's book, which tells of a woman's relationship with a brother who has a brain tumour as a child, was rejected by all the major publishers before it was eventually picked up by small Norfolk independent Galley Beggar Press. It went on to win the Baileys women's prize for fiction, and is, said Cleave at Thursday's Desmond Elliott prize ceremony, "the kind of novel that is written once in a generation and takes the art to an entirely new place".
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McBride's book, which tells of a woman's relationship with a brother who has a brain tumour as a child, was rejected by all the major publishers before it was eventually picked up by small Norfolk independent Galley Beggar Press. It went on to win the Baileys women's prize for fiction, and is, said Cleave at Thursday's Desmond Elliott prize ceremony, "the kind of novel that is written once in a generation and takes the art to an entirely new place".
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