Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish novelist and short story writer whose works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men and to society as a whole.

Life and career

Edna O'Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland in 1930, a place she would later describe as "fervid", "enclosed" and "catastrophic". According to O'Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman who had emigrated temporarily to America, and worked for some time as a maid in Brooklyn, New York for a well-off Irish-American family before returning to Ireland to raise a family.

In 1950, she was awarded a licence as pharmacist. She married, against her parents' wishes, in the summer of 1954 to the Czech/Irish writer Ernest Gébler and the couple moved to London. They raised two sons, Carlos and Sasha, but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Gébler died in 1998. In Ireland she read such writers as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first book O'Brien ever bought was Introducing James Joyce by T.S. Eliot. She has said that Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man made her realize that she wanted to pursue literature for the rest of her life.

She published her first book, The Country Girls, in 1960. This was the first part of a trilogy of novels (later collected as The Country Girls Trilogy) which also included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, these books were banned in Ireland due to their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters.

Her novel A Pagan Place, published in 1970, was about her childhood in a repressive Irish town. Indeed, her parents were vehemently against all things related to literature -- her mother strongly disapproved of Edna's career as an author, which greatly troubled Edna. In 1981 she wrote a play, Virginia, which was about Virginia Woolf and was staged originally in Canada and subsequently in the West End of London at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with Maggie Smith and directed by Robin Phillips. It was subsequently staged at the Public Theater in New York in the spring of 1985. Other notable works were a biography of James Joyce, released in 1999, and a biography of poet Lord Byron, "Byron in Love," published in 2009.

She has received numerous awards for her works, including a Kingsley Amis Award in 1962, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides.

In 2006, Edna O' Brien was appointed adjunct^[1] professor of English Literature in University College Dublin ^[2]. In 2009, Edna O’Brien was honoured with a special lifetime achievement award - the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award - at a special ceremony for the year’s Irish Book Awards in Dublin.^[3]

She was also one of the panelists for the first edition of the BBC programme Question Time in 1979.

Selected bibliography

• The Country Girls Trilogy (1987), collected with new epilogue, ISBN 0-14-010984-6
  • The Country Girls (1960), ISBN 0-14-001851-4
  • Girl with Green Eyes (1962), first published as The Lonely Girl, ISBN 0-14-002108-6
  • Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), ISBN 0-14-002649-5
• August Is a Wicked Month (1965), ISBN 0-14-002720-3
• Casualties of Peace (1966), ISBN 0-14-002875-7
• The Love Object (1968), ISBN 0-14-003104-9
• A Pagan Place (1970), ISBN 0-297-00027-6
• Zee & Co. (1971), ISBN 0-297-00336-4
• Night (1972), ISBN 0-297-99541-3
• A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories (1974), ISBN 0-297-76735-6
• Mother Ireland (1976), ISBN 0-297-77110-8
• Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), ISBN 0-297-77284-8
• Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978), ISBN 0-297-77476-X
• Some Irish Loving (1979), translations, ISBN 0-297-77581-2
• Returning (1982), short stories, ISBN 0-297-78052-2
• A Fanatic Heart (1985), short stories, ISBN 0-297-78607-5
• The High Road (1988), ISBN 0-297-79493-0
• On the Bone (1989), poetry, ISBN 0-906887-38-0
• Lantern Slides (1990), short stories ISBN 0-297-84019-3
• Time and Tide (1992), ISBN 0-670-84552-3
• House of Splendid Isolation (1994), ISBN 0-297-81460-5
• Down by the River (1996), ISBN 0-297-81806-6
• James Joyce (1999), biography, ISBN 0-297-84243-9
• Wild Decembers (1999), ISBN 0-297-64576-5
• In the Forest (2002), ISBN 0-297-60732-4
• The Light of Evening (2006), ISBN 0-618-71867-2
• Haunted (2009), play
• Byron in Love (2009), biography, ISBN 978-0393070118

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edna O'Brien

• [2]- Audio Interview with Edna O'Brien, May 22, 1992
• IMDB - list of films and TV works based on her stories and novels.
• Books and Writers - biography and list of works.