Country Girl - Edna O'Brien

Another writer who I not only admire but have shared a homeplace with, though not at the same time, is Edna O'Brien; like Elizabeth Jane Howard carrying on writing well past 'retirement' age, O'Brien had a new book of short stories, The Love Object, published in October and is in her 80s (83 on 15th December). Having left Tuamgraney, in County Clare,she described her childhood there in her first book The Country Girls (1960), which  was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit in Ireland. She wrote it after leaving her homeland for London (via Dublin) as the runaway bride of the writer Ernest Gebler, breaking with her parents. Gebler envied her success from the start and the marriage was a failure, though they raised two sons, Sasha and Carlo (also a writer). The novel A Pagan Place (1970) was also based on her childhood.

At the moment she is working on a novel about the night economy of migrant workers, which should be completed in a year or so, after which she intends to  work on a couple of plays. Despite a lifetime of having to deal with her mother, the church and her critics, to name but a few of the  problems she lists in her career, she says that the reason so many writers have come from Ireland is 'desperation and a gra for the language....G R A ...it's the Irish word for love.'

Sh e has written over twenty books. In 1962 she won the Kingley Amis award for the Country Girls! She won the Frank O'Connor international story award in 2011, her first big literary prize, and The Love Object contains most of these prizewinning stories; she is particularly proud of 'Shovel Kings' about the migration of Irish labourers to London and in part based on interviews she made in pubs. In 2012 she published her memoir, Country Girl.