Quiz

She was an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer.

Alongside Teddy Taylor (Conservative), Michael Foot (Labour) and Derek Worlock (Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool), O'Brien was a panel member for the first edition of the BBC's Question Time in 1979, and was awarded the first answer in the programme's history ("Edna O'Brien, you were born there", referring to Ireland). Taylor's death in 2017 left her as the sole surviving member.

Expatriated to London.

In 1980, she wrote a play, Virginia, about Virginia Woolf, and it was staged originally in June 1980 at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, Canada, and subsequently in the West End of London at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with Maggie Smith and directed by Robin Phillips. It was staged at The Public Theater in New York in 1985.

Her novel, A Pagan Place (1970), was about her repressive childhood. Her parents were vehemently against all things related to literature; her mother strongly disapproved of her daughter's career as a writer.

She published her first book, The Country Girls, in 1960. This was the first part of a trilogy of novels (later collected as The Country Girls Trilogy), which included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, these books were banned and, in some cases burned, in her native country due to their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. O'Brien herself was accused of "corrupting the minds of young women".

In 1950, having studied at night at pharmaceutical college and worked in a Dublin pharmacy during the day, O'Brien was awarded a licence as a pharmacist.

In September 2021, it was announced that O'Brien would be donating her archive to the National Library of Ireland. The library will hold papers from O'Brien covering the period of 2000 to 2021 and includes correspondence, drafts, notes, and revisions.

In March 2021, France announced that it would be naming O'Brien a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the country's highest honour for the arts.

Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., holds her papers from 1939 until 2000. More recent papers are at University College Dublin.

In the 1960s, she was a patient of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing: "I thought he might be able to help me. He couldn't do that - he was too mad himself - but he opened doors", she later said.

From 1941 to 1946, O'Brien was educated by the Sisters of Mercy at the Convent of Mercy boarding school at Loughrea, County Galway, a circumstance that contributed to a "suffocating" childhood.".

Her collection Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, with judge Thomas McCarthy referring to her as "the Solzhenitsyn of Irish life". RTÉ aired a documentary on her as part of its Arts strand in early 2012.

In 2006, she was appointed adjunct professor of English Literature in University College, Dublin.

In 2019, O'Brien was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature at a ceremony in London. The £40,000 prize, awarded every two years in recognition of a living writer's lifetime achievement in literature, has been described as the "UK and Ireland Nobel in literature". Judge David Park said "In winning the David Cohen Prize, Edna O'Brien adds her name to a literary roll call of honour".

Once when her mother found a Seán O'Casey book in her daughter's possession, she tried to burn it.

Her last novel, Girl (2019), was based on the abduction of a group of girls in Nigeria, for which she travelled to that country twice to do research, which included interviewing "escaped girls, their mothers and sisters, to trauma specialists, doctors and Unicef". She later said that she had tried to create a "kind of mythic story from all this pain and horror", and was disappointed by its poor reception in the US, although it received an award in France and was well-received in Germany.

O'Brien's awards include the Yorkshire Post Book Award in 1970 (for A Pagan Place), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides.

She chronicled the frenetic passions of Lord Byron in Byron in Love (2009).

In 1980, O'Brien appeared alongside Patrick McGoohan in the TV movie The Hard Way.