Edna O'Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, in 1930, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed." According to O'Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman who had emigrated temporarily to America, and worked for some time as a maid in Brooklyn, New York, for a well-off Irish-American family before returning to Ireland to raise a family. O'Brien was the only child of 'a strict, religious family.' In the years 1941-46 she was educated by the Sisters of Mercy - a circumstance which contributed to a 'suffocating' childhood. "I rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred. It was very frightening and all pervasive. I'm glad it has gone."
In 1950, she was awarded a licence as pharmacist. She married, against her parents' wishes, in the summer of 1954, the Czech/Irish writer Ernest Gébler and the couple moved to London - "We lived in SW 20. Sub-urb-ia." They raised two sons, Carlos and Sasha, but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Gébler died in 1998. In Ireland she read such writers as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In London, O'Brien bought Introducing James Joyce by T.S. Eliot, and has said that when she learnt Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an autobiographical story, it made her realise, 'where she might turn, should she want to write herself: "Unhappy houses are a very good incubation for stories." In London she started work as a reader for Hutchinson where, on the basis of her reports, she was commissioned, for £25, to write a novel.
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 also included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication these books were banned, and in some cases burnt, in Ireland, due to their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. In the 60s she was a patient of 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 said later.
She has received numerous awards for her works, including a Kingsley Amis Award in 1962 (for The Country Girls), the Yorkhire Post Book Award in 1970 (for A Pagan Place), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides. In 2006, Edna O' Brien was appointed adjunct professor of English Literature in University College, Dublin. In 2009, Edna O’Brien was honoured with a special lifetime achievement award - the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award - at a special ceremony for the year’s Irish Book Awards in Dublin. According to the novelist Andrew O'Hagan, her place in Irish letters is assured. " She changed the nature of Irish fiction; she brought the woman's experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international." And in the words of the novelist Colum McCann she has been "the advance scout for the Irish imagination" for over fifty years.
