(NEW YORK)— PEN America mourns the death today of Irish author Edna O’Brien, who defied convention in her native country and went on to international acclaim for her bold and courageous stories exploring women’s viewpoints and experiences, especially on then taboo subjects like religion, sex and gender.
She published 20 books but her first novel The Country Girls, published in 1960, established her as an iconoclast and a chronicler of women’s experiences. Written in just three weeks when she was a 30-year-old mother of two young children living outside of London, it brought her fame and also notoriety at home for its discussion of topics rarely captured then in novels. She died on Saturday at age 93.
Raised on a farm in rural County Clare, O’Brien was arguably the best known woman author of Ireland, and over many decades she was a well known figure on the global literary stage, dining at the White House with Hillary Rodham Clinton and befriending former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Hollywood actor Jack Nicholson.
O’Brien won the 2018 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and spoke that year at the PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony. Judges Michael Ondaatje and Diana Abu-Jaber cited O’Brien as “a master of the page,” whose writing “transcend[s] genres and periods.
PEN America was honored to celebrate her remarkable legacy of novels, short stories, plays and other works.
The judges wrote: “Emerging from a time and place when women authors were not the norm, O’Brien endured public condemnation, her books were burned and banned. Through it all, her writing remained undaunted, vital, her force unmitigated. Her stories cross oceans, go on the run, risk life and limb, and her readers are swept along on extraordinary journeys.
At the Literary Awards ceremony, she said: “There is a notion out there in the big world and frequently in the cool world, if you will forgive the cliché, that writing is elitist—writing isn’t elitist, it is the deepest thing we have. It is as essential to us as our breathing. It brings other worlds, other pain, other grief, other humanity, other enigmas to us through language. Writing is the Golden Fleece and we should never forget that.”
About PEN America
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. Learn more at pen.org.
Contact: Suzanne Trimel, [email protected], (201) 247-5057