On July 27, 2024, Edna O'Brien passed away at the age of 93. The Irish writer was one of the most influential literary voices of her generation, with her candid portrayals of Irish women fighting against the oppressive bounds of Ireland's traditional and religious values transforming the Irish literary canon.
O'Brien's first published novel, The Country Girls, kicked off her prolific writing career in 1960 with the deeply meaningful story of two young women who move away from rural County Clare. After they arrive in Dublin, they experience a sexual awakening outside the confines of their small village. The international bestseller reflects O'Brien's own life, and the title was banned by the Irish state censor because of the radical nature of its content.
By the end of her sixty-some years of writing, O'Brien published more than 20 novels and earned numerous awards such as the 2001 Irish PEN Award for Literature, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, the Saoi of Aosdána in 2015, and France's highest honor for the arts in 2021 as a commander of the French Ordre Des Lettres.
The Irish President Michael D. Higgins called O'Brien “a fearless teller of truth,” and the statement is thoroughly reflected in O'Brien's raw, insightful, and brutally and beautifully honest writing.
Edna O'Brien Books
A Pagan Place
A newly reissued edition of this haunting, poetic coming-of-age novel from “one of the great writers...in the English-speaking world” (The New York Times)
In A Pagan Place, Edna O’Brien returns to Ireland, the uniquely wonderful, terrible, and peculiar place she once called home. After leaving to join a religious community in Belgium, a young woman remembers her childhood on the western coast of Ireland. She reflects on the rituals of rural life, the people she encountered, and the enchanting beauty of the landscape.
This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of mischievous girls and druids in the woods. As the impressions of her former home intensify, her mind turns to the shocking event that led to her departure.
In the Forest
"O'Brien brings together the earthy and delicately poetic: she has the sound of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf." —Newsweek
O'Brien takes her reader into the mind of Michen O'Kane, a murder who terrorizes the countryside of western Ireland, and traces his transformation from a neglected child to a twisted killer. In the Forest is based on a true story of local horror, and O'Brien provides fragments of O'Kane's story while leaving her reader to try and make sense of his psyche.
A Fanatic Heart
In these selections from twenty years of her best short fiction, Edna O'Brien's A Fanatic Heart pulls the reader into a woman's experience.
Her stories portray a young Irish girl's view of obsessive love and its often wrenching pain, while tales of contemporary life show women who open themselves to sexuality, to disappointment, to madness. Throughout, there is always O'Brien's voice—wondrous, despairing, moving—examining passionate subjects that lay bare the desire and needs that can be hidden in a woman's heart.
Girl
Girl, Edna O’Brien’s hotly anticipated new novel, envisages the lives of the Boko Haram girls in a masterpiece of violence and tenderness.
I was a girl once, but not anymore.
So begins Girl, Edna O’Brien’s harrowing portrayal of the young women abducted by Boko Haram. Set in the deep countryside of northeast Nigeria, this is a brutal story of incarceration, horror, and hunger; a hair-raising escape into the manifold terrors of the forest; and a descent into the labyrinthine bureaucracy and hostility awaiting a victim who returns home with a child blighted by enemy blood. From one of the century's greatest living authors, Girl is an unforgettable story of one victim’s astonishing survival, and her unflinching faith in the redemption of the human heart.
Triptych and Iphigenia
Two plays by the acclaimed Irish author: an adaption of Euripides and an “emotionally bruising drama” of three women obsessed with the same man (The New York Times).
Triptych
With searing acuity, O’Brien presents the story of three women—a mistress, a wife, and a daughter—who are all helplessly drawn to Henry: their lover, husband, and father. While Henry himself never appears, his specter is never absent as these women confront the ways that love can simultaneously liberate and entrap. Triptych is a powerful work that explores sex, marriage, and predatory relationships.
Iphigenia
In this modern take on the Greek tragedy, O’Brien takes creative license with Euripides’s tale of a daughter sacrificed for the sake of war. This taut, contemporary version presents, in O’Brien’s own words, “a more equal representation of the power and presence of both male and female characters” (Edna O’Brien, Independent, UK).
