The Guardian view on the Baileys women’s prize for fiction – still needed, 20 years on
Irish writer Eimear McBride won the 2014 Baileys women’s prize for fiction with her ‘gleefully’ experimental first novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. Photograph: Teri Pengilley
“If female experience, stories and art are undervalued, everyone misses out. One only has to look at the sheer ravenousness with which Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels about female friendship have been devoured over the past few years to see that art that passes the Bechdel test is hungered for. (To pass this test, devised by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, a story must involve two women having a conversation that is not about men.)”