Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre London. Her first novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, took nine years to find a publisher and subsequently received a number of awards, including the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the Goldsmiths Prize. Her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, won the 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. In a 2018 Times Literary Supplement poll of two-hundred critics, academics and fiction writers, McBride was named one of the ten best British and Irish novelists writing today. Strange Hotel, her third novel, was published in 2020, and in 2021 she published her first book-length work of non-fiction, Something Out of Place.