The Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize, which has gone to such award-winning writers as J.M. Coetzee, Julian Barnes, and Seamus Heaney, went to Eimear McBride for her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.

The award includes a £1,500 cash prize, and, established by Foyles in 1964 in honor of poet Sir Geoffrey Cust Faber, who founded the publisher, Faber & Faber, is given out in alternate years to a work of prose or poetry by a writer under forty.

“I’m absolutely delighted that my book was chosen and it’s a huge—if somewhat intimidating—honor to be added to the prize’s long and illustrious back-list of recipients,” said the Irish writer McBride to The Guardian, whose book took ten years to find a publisher. The book has already won several awards, including the Goldsmiths prize, the Kerry Group Irish novel of the year award, the Desmond Elliott prize, and the Baileys women’s prize for fiction. Her book was also recently shortlisted for the 2014 Dylan Thomas Prize, but lost to Joshua Ferris’s novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour.

Geoffrey Faber judge Patrick Neale, a bookseller, said that McBride’s novel has “opened a new door for literature,” with fellow judge, Gaby Wood, adding that although she was surprised that the book hadn’t been snatched up before, “[W]hat [McBride] has done in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is so linguistically daring, so formally skillful, yet so heart-churningly strong that we thought, in the end, not to applaud it would be an act of blindness. I think all the judges were delighted—and quite relieved—to find the others felt the same.”

The novel was initially published by a small Norwich press, Galley Beggar, in June 2013, but was later released as a paperback edition in partnership with Faber & Faber.