Edna O’Brien, whose books were initially banned in Ireland but gained international acclaim, died Saturday after a long illness. She was 93 and her death was confirmed by her publisher, Faber, and the literary agency PFD.
“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said in a statement. “The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.”
O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections that challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual, and gender boundaries by tackling issues of loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution.
“O’Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul,” Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote of her in the Guardian in 2012.
O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London, when her novel The Country Girls bowed. Written in just three weeks and published in 1960 for an advance of roughly $75, The Country Girls follows the lives of two young women who go from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin.
Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York, while Ireland labeled it “filth” by Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and burned it publicly in O’Brien’s hometown of Tuamgraney, County Clare. Detractors included O’Brien’s parents and her husband, the author Ernest Gebler, from whom O’Brien was becoming estranged.
She continued the stories of Kate and Baba in The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss, and by the mid-1960s was an international celebrity.
O’Brien was recognized in the 1980s by the band Dexy’s Midnight Runners, who named her alongside Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, and Oscar Wilde, among others, in the literary tribute Burn It Down.
O’Brien’s honors included an Irish Book Award for lifetime achievement, the PEN/Nabokov prize, and the Frank O’Connor award in 2011 for her story collection Saints and Sinners.
She is survived by her sons, Marcus and Carlos.
