I was really pleased to learn that Eimear McBride had won the Bailey’s prize for Fiction for her Joycean tale, “ A Girl is a Half Formed Thing.”A stream of conciousness, visceral and disturbing tale of a young woman and her chaotic and exploitative sexual awakening. I was sitting in the Erpingham Arms, not too far from Norwich, where The Galley Beggar Press publishing house had produced this amazingly original novel, after just about everyone else had turned it down!

As I sipped my pint of Adnam’s, I began to reflect on “ Girl” and the prizes it had now won: The Goldsmiths prize, The Irish fiction award, and on literary prizes in general. By winning these prizes “ Girl” had shown how an experimental and disconcerting novel by an unheard of author, published by a tiny and obscure provincial press, could appeal to a panel of literary judges. All of these things were surely an inspiration to other previously unheard of authors; to experimental authors; and to small publishers. As well, of course, toother marginal, non mainstream writers, such as LGBT, BAME and other disenfranchised groups. There are now many more literary prizes than was the case just some twenty years ago.Everyone knows about The Pulitzer or The Booker. But these were, for the most part, awarded to middle class, middle aged, white authors, who were published by the big names like Bloomsbury, Penguin, Faber and Faber… there was clearly a vacuum. And there was unhappiness about how the prizes were awarded; Julian Barnes’ acerbic “ posh bingo” criticism was just one of many calls for change. The Bailey’s prize is solely for women’s fiction and has hopefully encouraged female writers.There has been an explosion in the literary prizes that are now awarded; a positive plethora of awards now exists and caters for first time authors and many other groups who weren’t catered for by Pulitzer and Booker prizes! Personally, I rather like the understated and discrete approach of the Windham-Campbell prize: a rather egalitarian, iconoclastic and deliberately left field way of allocating a total fund of $ 1.35 million, distributed amongst nine different writers. Each writer is informed by text or e mail; there’s no drum roll, fanfare or expensive glitzy London dinner.

Anyway, back to my pint ( now my second ) and to “ A Girl”……

……I’m hoping that the novel is made into a play and that this is not the only book she ever writes; though how do you better such an opening salvo!?