O'Brien, Edna
The Irish
One of the world’s most gifted writers, Edna O’Brien was born was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare in 1932.
Since publishing her first novel, "The Country Girls," in 1960, the author rarely has had a pen out of her hand. (She writes in longhand – “I feel that a typewriter or word processor would be an artificial barrier, would stymie the flow between conscious and unconscious,” she said in an interview with Irish America in 2007).
Since "The Country Girls," which, though an immense success in other parts of the world, was banned in Ireland, she has written over 20 novels, several collections of short stories, a number of plays, a book on James Joyce, and her latest book on Lord Byron, "Byron in Love."
All of O’Brien’s books, fiction or non, share one thing in common – good writing. At her very heart, O’Brien is a world-class story teller, and she is devoted to her art.
In the Irish America interview, she talked about how she will recede from life, “cut myself off and go into solitary to write a book. I know it is only a book and yet it is everything to me when I am doing it.”
O’Brien has received numerous awards, including a Kingsley Amis Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
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