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1 October 2014updated 12 Oct 2023 10:22am

The shortlist for the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize has been announced

The award for “fiction at its most novel” returns for its second year.

By Critic

“For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name…” The opening words of Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing are like blows from a hammer. An uncompromising, stream-of-consciousness novel that took almost a decade to find a publisher, the book won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize – a literary prize for “fiction at its most novel” launched by Goldsmiths, University of London, and the New Statesman in 2013. McBride – whose novel was rejected by all the major UK publishers before it was eventually picked up by the independent imprint Galley Beggar Press – went on to sweep the board, winning everything from the Desmond Elliot Prize to the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

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