The Art of Reading is a monthly book club hosted by Colm Tóibín, the Laureate for Irish Fiction.
Each month, the Laureate meets a different library book club to discuss a book by an Irish writer, highlighting outstanding Irish writing and celebrating the reader and book clubs.
The selected titles celebrate new work by contemporary Irish writers, but previous episodes have also highlighted work from the past that the Laureate wishes to bring to a new generation of readers.
This episode features Colm in conversation with Eimear McBride about her debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, first published in 2013 - watch their conversation above.
Eimear McBride is the author of three novels: Strange Hotel, The Lesser Bohemians and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. She held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading which resulted in the performance work ‘Mouthpieces’ - later broadcast by RTE Radio.
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Listen to Mouthpieces by Eimear McBride
Her first full length non-fiction work, Something Out of Place: Women & Disgust, was published in 2021, while her first foray into film writing and direction A Very Short Film About Longing, produced by DMC and BBC Film, has recently been completed.
She is the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Desmond Eliot Prize and the Kerry Prize. She grew up in the west of Ireland and now lives in London.
The Art of Reading Book Club is an initiative of the Arts Council and the Laureate for Irish Fiction, in partnership with Libraries Ireland. Find out more here.
