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Edna O'Brien

Edna O’Brien was born on 15 December 1930 in Tuamgraney, County Clare. Educated at the Convent of Mercy in Loughrea, County Galway, she married the writer Ernest Gébler (later separated) and moved to London in 1959. Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960) is the first in a trilogy of novels (with The Girl with the Green Eyes in 1962 and Girls in Their Married Bliss in 1964) about two young convent-educated Irish girls who rebel against their upbringing and run away to Dublin and London. These and several other novels were banned by the Irish Censorship Board.

She is also the author of a trilogy of novels about modern Ireland: House of Splendid Isolation (1994), in which she writes about Irish nationalism and sectarian violence; Down by the River (1996), based on the true story of a young Irish rape victim forced to travel to England for a legal abortion; and Wild Decembers (1999), about a farmer, Joseph Brennan, and his sister, Breege, living in an isolated rural community. In the Forest (2002), is based on the true story of a disturbed and abused young man who murdered a young mother, her son and a Catholic priest in the west of Ireland in the early 1990s. Her collection of short stories, Saints and Sinners was published in 2011.

Prizes and awards

  • 1962 Kingsley Amis Award - The Country Girls
  • 1970 Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year) - A Pagan Place
  • 1990 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) - Lantern Slides
  • 1991 Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy) - Girl with Green Eyes
  • 1993 Writers’ Guild Award (Best Fiction) - Time and Tide
  • 1995 European Prize for Literature (European Association for the Arts) - House of Splendid Isolation
  • 2001 Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award
  • 2006 Ulysses Medal (University College Dublin)
  • 2009 Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature
  • 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award - Saints and Sinners


  • Saints and Sinners

    Saints and Sinners
    Edna O Brien

    Paperback · 02 Feb 2012 · €9.99

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    A collection in which, a woman walks the streets of Manhattan and contemplates with exquisite longing the precarious affair she has embarked on, amidst the grandeur and cacophony of the cityscape; and a young Irish girl and her mother are thrilled to be invited to visit the glamorous Coughlan's but find they leave disappointed.

 

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