Edna O’Brien
Josephine Edna O'Brien DBE (15 December 1930 – 27 July 2024)
Edna O'Brien was an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer. She was born in Tuamgraney in Co Clare. Her writing often spoke to women's experiences and described the inner world of women and their challenges in society.
Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), has been credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland after the Second World War. It was banned in Ireland and denounced by the church. The archbishop of Dublin at the time, Archbishop John McQuaid, denounced it as a “smear on Irish womanhood.”
Throughout her career, she won numerous prestigious awards. Philip Roth once described her as "the most gifted woman now writing in English." Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson cited her as "one of the great creative writers of her generation."
For me, what stands out is not only the beauty of her writing and how she wrote about Ireland but also the courage she had as an Irish woman to write the truth of her experience at a time in Ireland when this seemed impossible. She dared to do so and inspired countless others in her wake.
The Irish president, Michael D. Higgins, also a writer and poet, wrote: "Through that deeply insightful work, rich in humanity, Edna O’Brien was one of the first writers to provide a true voice to the experiences of women in Ireland in their different generations and played an important role in transforming the status of women across Irish society.”
Source - wikipedia for sources quoted from media/articles.Scríbhneoirí Gaeilge | Irish Writers
For such a small island, Ireland has produced some of the finest writers in the world. Playwrights, poets, short story writers and four Nobel Prize winners, to name but a few, it is an extraordinary heritage. This series is designed to deepen your connection to Ireland, the country's heart and soul, and its people's rich literary heritage. As Yeats pointed out, we need to know the writers, the poets and the playwrights of that landscape and country to come to know Ireland in our own body and soul.
