Edna O’Brien remembered as ‘brave writer’

By Cillian Sherlock, PA

Tributes have continued for acclaimed Irish novelist Edna O’Brien following her death at the age of 93.

The author died peacefully on Saturday following a long illness, a statement from her agent and publishing house said.

O’Brien – a novelist, short story writer, memoirist, poet and playwright – is best known for her portrayal of women’s lives against repressive expectations in Irish society.

On Monday, Co Wexford-born author Colm Tóibín said O’Brien was a “brave writer” who “broke glass in Ireland”.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “She wrote about sexuality, about women, about young women’s lives.

“In a way she was punished for that, the censorship laws were there, but it wasn’t just the Irish censorship laws, it was the entire way society dealt with her.”

Toibin, author of novels including Brooklyn and House Of Names, added: “When I was growing up, for example, there was a book of hers hidden over the wardrobe.

“The name Edna O’Brien suggested not only, I suppose, the breaking of glass, as I said, but a sort of glamour – moving to London and living a different sort of life.

“The life she lived in London was a sort of lifetime effort to get over that initial idea that she was a filthy writer, that she was a scandalous woman – a title of one of her other books – that she was a very serious literary artist.”

President Michael D Higgins said she was “one of the outstanding writers of modern times” while Taoiseach Simon Harris said Ireland had “lost an icon”.

Mr Harris said: “Edna said that her writing was her breathing and in recent years while promoting her novel Girl she told interviewers ‘I want to go out as someone who spoke the truth’.”