Rejected Novel Wins Top Literary Prize, Beating Americanah

A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing is Ms. McBride’s first novel.
A novel by U.K. author, Eimear McBride, A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing, on Wednesday emerged the winner of the prestigious Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction beating Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah.
Ms. McBride’s first novel also topped American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch to win the $30,000 (N4.8 million) prize.
According to the U.K. Daily Mail, Ms. McBride wrote the novel within six months in 2004. However, over the years, it was rejected by almost every publisher she took it to as “too experimental.”
Eventually, in 2013, it was published by Norwich-based (her hometown) independent publisher, Gallery Beggar Press, who gave her a £600 advance. It was then p!cked up by Faber & Faber.
The chairperson of the Women’s Prize for Fiction judging panel, Helen Fraser, called the novel “an amazing and ambitious first novel.”
“This is an extraordinary new voice – this novel will move and astonish the reader,” she said.