One of the most acclaimed Irish writers of the past seventy-five years, Edna O’Brien produced a number of ground-breaking novels, often addressing attitudes to women’s lives and sexuality. Her first book, The Country Girls, was commissioned in 1960 by the publisher Hutchinson, for whom O’Brien was a manuscript reader. The Country Girls and its sequels, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss, were critically lauded, but fell foul of censorship from the Catholic Church for their depiction of young women’s religious rebellion and sexual awakening. The theme of growing up as a woman in rural Ireland was one that O’Brien returned to several times, notably in 1970’s A Pagan Place. Two of her later works, In the Forest, based on a real-life murder inquiry, and The Little Red Chairs, about a dangerous travelling charlatan modelled on the Balkan war criminal Radovan Karadzic, are amongst her most revered novels. O’Brien also penned numerous short story collections, plays and works of non-fiction, including biographies of James Joyce and Lord Byron.
Edna O’Brien passed away in July 2024 after a long illness.
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