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Edna O’Brien Dies: Author Who Gave Voice To Irish Women Was 93


Author Edna O'Brien was banned in her native Ireland for a time, but became world famous.

O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections that challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual, and gender boundaries by tackling issues of loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution. “O’Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul,” Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote of her in the Guardian in 2012. Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York, while Ireland labeled it “filth” by Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and burned it publicly in O’Brien’s hometown of Tuamgraney, County Clare.

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