*Edna O’Brien. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
ONE of the country’s greatest writers, Tuamgraney native Edna O’Brien has died.
She died at the age of 93 on Saturday peacefully after a long illness.
Her literary agent, PFD, and publisher, Faber in a joint statement, said “Our thoughts are with her family and friends, in particular her sons Marcus and Carlo. The family has requested privacy at this time”.
Born in December 1930 to farmer Michael O’Brien and Lena Cleary in Drewsborough, Tuamgraney, Edna became one of the country’s leading writers of all-time and among the biggest literary giants across generations.
In May of this year, her native area honoured her when the Scariff library was renamed the Edna O’Brien Library. This followed a proposal from Cllr Pat Hayes (FF) and ensures the Scariff library is the only one in Clare named after a woman with the others named after political and historical figures such as Eamon de Valera (Ennis), Sean Lemass (Shannon), William Smith O’Brien (Newmarket-on-Fergus) and Dr Patrick J. Hillery (Miltown Malbay). Efforts were made by Cllr Paul Murphy (FG) for the new county library in Ennis to be named after Edna.
Her debut novel, ‘The Country Girls’ was released in 1960 and its publication caused a huge reaction. It has been heralded on lifting taboos on sexual and social issues in Ireland following World War Two. The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit.
A trailblazer, she continued over the next five decades, she continued to challenge the commonly held assumptions on what women should write about. The topics of her work regularly deal with the relationship between the sexes from a female perspective, how women are changed by their relationships with men and how they can retain their personhood in a male-dominated world.
Edna was conferred with honorary doctorates by Galway University, Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Limerick. In 2006 University College Dublin awarded her the Ulysses Medal, the highest prize the university can bestow.
In September 2015 she was elected as a Saoi of Aosdána in a ceremony presided over by President Michael D Higgins.
On 10 April 2018, for her contributions to literature, she was appointed an honorary Dame of the Order of the British Empire.
She was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature at a ceremony in London in 2019. The £40,000 prize, awarded every two years in recognition of a living writer’s lifetime achievement in literature, has been described as the “UK and Ireland Nobel in literature”. A year earlier, she received the Pen Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
France announced that it would be awarding O’Brien Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest honour for the arts in March 2021
In September 2021, it was announced that O’Brien would be donating her archive to the National Library of Ireland. The Library will hold papers from O’Brien covering the period of 2000 to 2021 and includes correspondence, drafts, notes, and revisions. O’Brien’s papers from 1939 to 2000 are held by Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
President Michael D. Higgins said Edna was one of the most outstanding writers of modern times. “Edna was a fearless teller of truths, a superb writer possessed of the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed.”
“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. While the beauty of her work was immediately recognised abroad, it is important to remember the hostile reaction it provoked among those who wished for the lived experience of women to remain far from the world of Irish literature, with her books shamefully banned upon their early publication,” the President stated.
Faber, her publisher, said she was one of the greatest writers of our age. “She revolutionised Irish literature, capturing the lives of women and the complexities of the human condition in prose that was luminous and spare, and which had a profound influence on so many writers who followed her. A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling. The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave. Edna was a dear friend to us all, and we will miss her dreadfully. It is Faber’s huge privilege to publish her, and her bold and brilliant body of work lives on”.
Literary agent Caroline Michel of PFD said: “In Girl with Green Eyes, the immortal centrepiece of the masterful Country Girls trilogy, Edna writes, ‘We all leave one another. We die … If I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it’s inescapable.’ “Edna is inescapable … once read, once met, she is forever rebelliously and joyously in your life,” she said.
Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan said that Edna “changed the nature of Irish fiction; she brought the woman’s experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international”. She has been described by Irish novelist Colum McCann as “the advance scout for the Irish imagination” for over five decades.
Philip Roth labelled her as “the most gifted woman now writing in English”, while a former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, cited her as “one of the great creative writers of her generation”. Others to hail her as one of the greatest writers alive include John Banville, Michael Ondaatje and Sir Ian McKellen
