Tributes poured in on Sunday for Edna O’Brien, the radical Irish writer whose groundbreaking first novel The Country Girls was burned and banned in her native country, after her death at 93.
“She died peacefully on Saturday 27 July after a long illness,” said a statement from her publishers Faber Books posted on social media.
Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris said the nation had “lost an icon” and “a brave, gifted, dignified and magnetic person.”
Photo: AFP
“Most people would have stopped and hidden away with the misogyny she faced, but Edna O’Brien kept working on her artistry and became one of modern Ireland’s most celebrated and honoured writers,” he said in a statement on social media. “It is for all of us to reflect upon, and never forget, that to reach her potential Edna would leave Ireland and make London her home.”
Irish President Michael Higgins said he had learned of the death of his “dear friend” O’Brien with “great sorrow.”
She was “one of the outstanding writers of modern times” and “a fearless teller of truths,” he said in a statement. “While the beauty of her work was immediately recognised abroad, it is important to remember the hostile reaction it provoked among those who wished for the lived experience of women to remain far from the world of Irish literature, with her books shamefully banned upon their early publication.”
Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Defense Micheal Martin, a former prime minister, hailed O’Brien as a “pioneer, never afraid to push boundaries through her work” who helped “usher in a new era in literature and in modern Ireland.”
Irish Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media Catherine Martin described O’Brien as “a modernizing force in Irish society who fearlessly advanced the cause of equality.”
The honors she eventually received from her native Ireland included the Presidential Distinguished Service Award in 2018.
The Country Girls, about the sexual initiation of rebellious Catholic girls, drawn from O’Brien’s childhood experiences, is now a marker in modern Irish literature for its breaking of social and sexual taboos.
“The novel, published in 1960, caused a bit of consternation. People were outraged,” O’Brien told the Guardian in 2008. “The few copies purchased in Limerick were burnt after the rosary, one evening in the parish grounds, at the request of the priest. I received anonymous letters, all malicious. Then it was banned.”
O’Brien was born in 1930 into a strict Catholic farming family in west Ireland’s County Clare.
She was educated at a convent school and then in Dublin, where she graduated with a pharmacist’s license in 1950, at about the time she was discovering a passion for Leo Tolstoy, F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot.
In 2018, she won the prestigious PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, honored for having broken down “social and sexual barriers for women in Ireland and beyond.”
In 2021, France made her a commander in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the nation’s highest cultural distinction.
She received France’s Prix Femina special prize in 2019, honoring the ensemble of her work.
Recalling the “chauvinist” reactions to her first novel, O’Brien said it was a “foretaste of judgements to come.”
“I had not at that time read Lord Byron’s maxim that a man should calculate on his powers of resistance before entering on a career of writing,” she wrote in the Guardian in 2008. “I have since read it and must add that a woman embarking on a career of writing needs those powers one hundred-fold.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS