2024-07-29 08:40:29
Edna O’Brien, one of Ireland’s best writers, died this Saturday after a long illness. She was 93 years old. Her publishing house Faber informed about the death. In 2003, the author was a guest of the Prague Writers’ Festival.
She already caused a sensation with the first film The Country Girls (Country Girls) from 1960, which outraged her then strongly Catholic and conservative native country. The book was banned and even burned in Ireland. However, the author gained international recognition.
Edna O’Brien has published more than 20 books. Most of them were novels and short story collections. She also wrote five plays and four works of non-fiction. In her prose, she questioned the religious, sexual, and gender boundaries of Ireland. She wrote until she was 90 years old. Her latest novel Girl (Dívka) from 2019 tells about girls kidnapped in Nigeria by the terrorist group Boko Haram.
Her portrayal of the female experience was so universal that in 2021 she received France’s highest cultural honor. In the 1960s, Wanda Zámecká’s book The Girl with Green Eyes was published in a Czech translation, and in the new millennium a bilingual version of her play Virginia, about the life of the English writer Virginia Woolf. The play, translated by Ivana Bozděchová, was presented by the Kolowrat Theater in Prague.
Edna O’Brien was born in 1932 in a remote corner of western Ireland. Her bigoted family had no understanding of literature. After graduating from elementary school, she went to a convent school. In 1950, she obtained her license as a pharmacist. In the summer of 1954, she married the Irish writer Ernest Gébler, who had Czech Jewish roots. With him and two sons, she moved to London, where she worked for a publishing house. However, after her literary successes, she and her husband became estranged and later divorced.
“Edna was a fearless truth teller, an excellent writer. She had the moral courage to confront Irish society with facts that had long been ignored and suppressed,” said Irish President Michael Higgins, who described the writer as his dear friend.
“Although the beauty of her work was immediately recognized abroad, it is important to recall the hostile reaction of those who wished to keep women’s experiences out of the world of Irish literature. Fortunately, Edna O’Brien’s books are now recognized as outstanding works of art,” added the President . In 2015, he apologized to the author for the contempt she once received in her homeland.