"Edna O'Brien is one of the greatest writers in the English-speaking world." -- New York Times Book Review
Edna O'Brien (b. 1930), an award-winning Irish author of novels, plays, and short stories, has been hailed as one of the greatest chroniclers of the female experience in the twentieth century. She is the 2011 recipient of the Frank OConnor Prize, awarded for her short stories.
Edna O’Brien is a literary marvel. For sixty years she has been creating stories that give voice to women fighting to overcome the circumstances into which they were born. In the early 1960s O’Brien’s portrayals of rebellious young Irish women were deemed too risqué in her native country, where for a time her books were banned. This week her latest novel, Girl, is being published in the US, capping a career remarkable not only for its longevity and prolificacy (seventeen novels, in addition to short story collections, children’s books, poetry, plays for theater and screen, literary biographies and memoirs), but also for the critical acclaim it has garnered. O’Brien is regularly lauded by critics as one of the finest writers of our time, a status affirmed by her numerous literary awards and legions of admiring readers.
The eighty-eight-year old author currently lives in England, as she has done most of her adult life, but her soul resides in the pastures and villages of the west of Ireland, a land that she depicts with exquisite detail and texture that is nourished by the recollected impressions and sensations of her upbringing. Given that Ireland, and often London (the Shangri-La for O’Brien’s farm girls), are the settings for most of her novels, and that nearly all of them feature Irish-born protagonists, Girl seems at first to be a surprising departure. The novel takes place in Nigeria and concerns a schoolgirl who is kidnapped by Boko Haram. However, like O’Brien’s previous novels, Girl resounds with the author’s true métier—the emotional dissonance between mothers and daughters.
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