Speaker(s): Eimear McBride | Editor's note: Unfortunately Ali Smith was unable to speak at this event. The turn of the 20th century saw a move away from the traditional towards the experimental and radical in the arts, with modernist writers breaking with established forms and subjects. In this discussion two award-winning contemporary novelists discuss modernism, its legacy and their own revolutionary approaches to fiction. Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took nine years to publish and subsequently received the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Goldsmiths Prize, Desmond Elliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her latest novel is The Lesser Bohemians. Ali Smith has won numerous awards for her work, including the Baileys Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize for How to be both, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her latest novel, Autumn, is an inventive meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive. Toby Lichtig (@TobyLichtig) is an editor at the Times Literary Supplement.