Quick fire questions: Eimear McBride

Every night, in the luxurious surroundings of the Baileys Prize Book Bar, we asked three bookish questions of our notable guests. At our event on Friday night, we caught up with 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction winner Eimear McBride. Read on to find out the book Eimear would recommend right now and why reading is everything to her.

What does the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction mean to you?

Well, winning the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction was a completely life-changing event for me personally. As a Prize, I think it is hugely important in the literary world, it has allowed a lot of work that may have been ignored to come to the fore and a lot of wonderful writers to be celebrated who may not have been celebrated otherwise, or may have taken a lot longer to do so. It’s an enormously important prize.

What book right now would you recommend to anyone?

The book I would absolutely recommend for anyone to read is Everyone is Watching by Megan Bradbury, which is an incredibly interesting beautifully written book from a really wonderful debut author. I think you won’t have read anything like it and you won’t be sorry that you have.

What book would you take with you to a desert island. 

The book I couldn’t live without (and I hate answering this question because I always have to answer the same way, because it is always true) is Ulysses by James Joyce. This is the book that you can never get to the end of, you can probably never even get to the beginning of; but it is the book of everything.

What does the pleasure of reading mean to you?

The pleasure of reading, well – it’s more like life than anything else, isn’t it? It’s the thing that makes sense of the world, it’s the thing that makes the hours go round and time worth living through.