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.
Edna O'Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland in 1930, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed." 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 Brookly, 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 Gebler and the couple moved to London. They raised two sons, they ultimately divorced, and Gebler 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 (and, occasionally, even burned in churchyards) 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. Another notable work was a biography of James Joyce, released in 1999.
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 professor of English Literature in University College Dublin.
