LONDON.- The Irish writer Edna O’Brienknown for its rebel and feminist literaturedied on Saturday at the age of 93, his agent and publisher announced on Sunday.
Edna O’Brien died “peacefully on Saturday 27th July after a long illness,” according to a message from her agent Caroline Michel and her publisher, Faber, posted on the latter’s X account.
“Edna O’Brien was one of the greatest writers of our time, revolutionising Irish literature by capturing the lives of women and the complexities of the human condition in luminous, simple prose,” the message added.
Irish President Michael D Higgins described her as “one of the most exceptional writers of modern times”. He paid tribute in a statement to an author endowed with “the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored”.
Trajectory
His first novel The country girls (1960), about the sexual initiation of Catholic girls, based on her personal experience, was a milestone in modern Irish literature for breaking sexual and social taboos.
The book was banned from Dublin bookstores and sometimes burned for its lack of religion and pornography. His next six books would suffer the same fate.
In some twenty novels, the Irish writer describes her country as violent and backward. With her crude and lyrical language, she explores the intimacy of women sacrificed by an education that she considered repressive and medieval.
O’Brien was born in 1930 to a strict rural Catholic family in County Clare in the west of Ireland. She was educated at a convent school and then went to Dublin, where she earned a degree in pharmacology in 1950, and in the process became fascinated by writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Francis Scott Fitzgerald and TS Eliot.
In 2018, she won the prestigious Nabokov Prize from American PEN for breaking “social and sexual barriers for women in Ireland and elsewhere” around the world.
Source: AFP