Caroline Michel at PFD and Faber announce the death of beloved author Edna O'Brien
By Faber Editor, 29 July 2024
It is with great sadness that Caroline Michel at PFD and Faber announce the death of beloved author Edna O’Brien. She died peacefully on Saturday 27 July after a long illness. Our thoughts are with her family and friends, in particular her sons Marcus and Carlo. The family has requested privacy at this time.
Faber said:
Edna O’Brien was one of the greatest writers of our age. She revolutionised Irish literature, capturing the lives of women and the complexities of the human condition in prose that was luminous and spare, and which had a profound influence on so many writers who followed her. A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling. The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave. Edna was a dear friend to us all, and we will miss her dreadfully. It is Faber’s huge privilege to publish her, and her bold and brilliant body of work lives on.
Caroline Michel, PFD, said:
In Girl with Green Eyes . . . the immortal centrepiece of the masterful Country Girls trilogy . . . Edna writes:
‘We all leave one another. We die . . . If I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it’s inescapable.’
Edna is inescapable . . . once read, once met, she is forever rebelliously and joyously in your life.
Tributes to Edna O’Brien
‘I decide I need something, an image that I can hold on to after my mother’s death and instantly it comes. It’ll be her hands, the left holding the spiral notebook, the right holding the pen, driving the nib across the page.’
On Woman’s Hour this morning, Eimear McBride spoke to Nuala McGovern about the first time she read the work of Edna O’Brien:
‘It was the first time that I had experienced language that was so rich that it felt like it came alive inside you.’
‘Her words just burned through me, alive with feeling and beauty and want. To be a body, to be a woman, to suffer and to love, no one wrote of these experiences as she did.’
‘It has to be firmly said how much she was admired, feted and adored, how clear was the light she shone for the writers who followed her.’