Image source, Getty Images
- author, Charlotte Gallagher
- Role, Culture Correspondent
The famous Irish writer Edna O’Brien has died at the age of 93.
Her literary agent, BFD, and her publisher, Faber, said she died peacefully on Saturday after a long illness.
They said their thoughts were with “her family and friends, especially her sons Marcus and Carlo.”
Born in rural County Clare in 1930, O’Brien found her nun education stifling and moved to Dublin to escape, spending much of her life in London.
Her first novel, Country Girls, was published in 1960.
The groundbreaking novel, which tells the story of two female friends and depicts female sexuality, has shocked Ireland.
The Irish government banned the novel and its two subsequent stories, “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Wedded Bliss”.
Some copies were burned, including one in O’Brien’s village.
But the books were huge successes, and are credited with challenging traditional societal views.
O’Brien has written more than 20 novels, as well as plays and autobiographies.
Many of her novels dealt with the suffering of women in a male-dominated world.
The writer has also received numerous awards including the Ben Nabokov Prize.
Irish President Michael D Higgins said he was “deeply saddened” and described O’Brien as “a courageous truth-teller, a brilliant writer who had the moral courage to confront Irish society with truths that had long been ignored and suppressed”.
“Through this profound, insightful, and humane work, Edna O’Brien was one of the first women writers to give an authentic voice to the experiences of women in Ireland across generations and played an important role in transforming the status of women in Irish society.
“While the beauty of her work was immediately recognised abroad, it is important to remember the hostile reaction it provoked among those who wished women’s lived experience to remain outside the world of Irish literature, with her books shamefully banned upon their early publication.”
“It was very difficult and this is not said out of self-pity, but the true thing is that language and the mystery of language and the miracle of language, as that beautiful song Carrickfergus says, carried me into… the great richness of language,” she added.
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