Eimear McBride Books in Order

Eimear McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 to Northern Irish parents, both of whom worked as nurses. When she was three, the family moved to Tubbercurry in County Sligo, in the west of Ireland. After her father died of cancer, the family later moved to Castlebar in County Mayo, where she spent her teenage years.

She began writing young, around the age of seven or eight. Books and storytelling were already part of her life, but she did not take a straight route into publishing. At seventeen, she moved to London to study acting at Drama Centre London.

Acting mattered, even though it did not become her career.

The training taught her to think closely about character, physical feeling and what goes unsaid. After graduating, she decided she did not want to pursue acting professionally. She worked, travelled and kept writing, including a four-month stay in Saint Petersburg in 2000 that fed her long-standing interest in Russian literature.

In 2003 and 2004, McBride wrote A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing in six months. The book was intense, fragmented and hard to place, and it spent nine years looking for a publisher before it was released in 2013. Its unnamed young narrator grows up amid family illness, religious pressure, sexual violence and the lasting bond with her brother. The novel brought McBride several major prizes, including the Goldsmiths Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Her next novel, The Lesser Bohemians, arrived in 2016. It follows Eily, an Irish drama student newly arrived in 1990s London, and her relationship with the older actor Stephen. It is a story about sex, first love, performance and the difficult work of understanding another person’s past. The book won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

McBride’s fiction often stays close to a character’s thought process. Her narrators can be funny, angry, vulnerable and impulsive, sometimes all within a page. She returns to young women finding their footing, bodies and desire, complicated family ties, and cities that make room for reinvention while also making loneliness harder to ignore.

With Strange Hotel, she turned to a nameless woman passing through hotel rooms and old memories across many cities. Her nonfiction book Something Out of Place looks at the ways women are judged, shamed and treated as objects of disgust. In Mouthpieces, three compact performance texts give female voices a fierce, stripped-back space.

She has also worked beyond the page. McBride held the first Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading, and she later wrote and directed the short film A Very Short Film About Longing. She was living in London when Something Out of Place was published, continuing a career that moves between novels, essays, performance and film.