Edna O’Brien

(* 1930)

Biographical Sketch

Edna O’Brien (born Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, December 15, 1930) is an Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer whose works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole. Her first novel, The Country Girls – the first part of what would eventiually become a trilogy of novels (collected as The Country Girls Trilogy), which also included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964) – is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II. The Country Girls was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit, and O’Brien left Ireland behind. She now lives in London.

Other notable works include Virginia (1981), a play about Virginia Woolf that was staged originally in Canada and subsequently in the West End of London at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, starring Maggie Smith and directed by Robin Phillips; the novels House of Splendid Isolation (1994) – about a terrorist who goes on the run (part of her research involved visiting Irish republican Dominic McGlinchey, later shot dead, whom she called “a grave and reflective man”)–, Down by the River (1996), which concerned an under-age rape victim who sought an abortion in England, the “Miss X case,” and In the Forest (2002), which dealt with the real-life case of Brendan O’Donnell, who abducted and murdered a woman, her three-year-old son and a priest in rural Ireland; as well as her biographies of James Joyce, published in 1999, and of the poet Lord Byron, Byron in Love (2009).

She has received numerous awards for her works, including a Kingsley Amis Award in 1962 (for The Country Girls), the Yorkshire Post Book Award in 1970 (for A Pagan Place, a novel based on her own repressive childhood experience), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for her short story collection Lantern Slides. In 2006, O’Brien was appointed adjunct professor of English Literature in University College, Dublin. In 2009, she was honoured with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at a special ceremony for the year’s Irish Book Awards in Dublin. She won the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for her collection Saints and Sinners, with judge Thomas McCarthy referring to her as “the Solzhenitsyn of Irish life”. RTÉ aired a documentary on her as part of its Arts strand in early 2012. Philip Roth wrote in 2012 that he considers her “the most gifted woman now writing in English”, and former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, in a 2012 article published in The Irish Times, called her “one of the great creative writers of her generation.”

Read more about Edna O’Brien on Wikipedia.

A Selection of Quotes

A Fanatic Heart: Sister Imelda

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”

Find more quotes by Edna O’Brien on Wikiquote and Goodreads.

Links

• Edna O’Brien’s Open Road Media author page
• Edna O’Brien’s interview with the Paris Review (The Art of Fiction, No. 82)
• Edna O’Brien at Britannica.com
• Edna O’Brien’s biography at the Kirjasto Authors’ Calendar
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• Reviews and blog posts related to Edna O’Brien on this blog, Lioness at Large

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