Copyright photograph by Murdo MacLeod
It is with great sadness that Caroline Michel at PFD and Faber announce the death of beloved 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.
Edna wrote more than twenty celebrated works of fiction, including her classic The Country Girls Trilogy, as well as plays and four works of non-fiction, which have been translated internationally into over 30 territories. Her final novel was the acclaimed Girl, which was awarded the Kerry Group Prize for Fiction in 2020. She was the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O’Connor Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award For Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature, as well as being appointed an honorary Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 2018. In 2021, O’Brien was also awarded the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she lived in London for many years before her death on 27th July 2024.
A statement from our CEO, Caroline Michel:
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 onto 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
‘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.’ Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’Brien.
On the Today programme, Colm Tóibín reflects on Edna O’Brien’s literary legacy.
‘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.’ Writers pay tribute to Edna O’Brien in @IrishTimes
‘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.’ Anne Enright on Edna O’Brien.