Edna O’Brien (1930-2024), Rebel Daughter of Ireland

KPFA - Radio Wolinsky

​​​​​The great Irish novelist and playwright Edna O’Brien died at the age of 93 on July 27, 2024 after a long illness. A controversial figure from the start, her first novel from 1960, The Country Girls, which dealt with sexual and social issues in Ireland following World War II, was banned in Ireland and denounced on the pulpit, and while she moved to London with her husband before publication, she never moved back to her native land.

This interview was conducted in the KPFA studios on April 28, 2000 while she was on tour for her novel, “Wild Decembers,” third in a thematic trilogy of novels set in the recent past in Ireland. It was later adapted for television in 2008..

Of Edna O’Brien, from Wikipedia, the novelist Andrew O’Hagan wrote, “She changed the nature of Irish fiction, she brought the woman’s experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international.” In her lifetime, Edna O’Brien wrote seventeen novels, several plays, eight short story collections, eight works of non-fiction, four children’s books and a collection of poems.

Edna O’Brien continued to write novels and plays well into her nineties. Her final novel, Girl, was published in 2019.

This interview was digitized, remastered and edited in August 2024 and is heard for the first time in its entirety. A second interview, recorded in 2003 while in San Francisco working on her play “Triptych” at the Magic Theatre will be posted on a later date.

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