The Challenges and Satisfactions of Literary Fiction, featuring Eimear McBride

This week we’re celebrating 100 episodes, and bringing you Brooke’s conversation with Eimear McBride (author of Strange Hotel and A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing). This is a rigorous and engaging conversation about the merits of literary fiction and why McBride wants her readers to actually take the effort to read her work. She is feisty and refreshing, saying, “I object to art being strangled by idiocy.” This interview will make you want to be a better literary citizen.

ABOUT EIMEAR MCBRIDE

Eimear McBride is the author of the novels The Lesser Bohemians (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (winner of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and others). She was the inaugural creative fellow at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading, and occasionally writes for The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, and The Irish Times. She lives in London.