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Edna O’Brien
Edna O’Brien was a London-based Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer and memoirist. One of the great creative writers of her generation, she received the Irish PEN Award in 2001, and in 2011 her collection Saints and Sinners won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In 2012, her memoir, Country Girl, won the Irish Book Awards. In 2015, O’Brien was appointed a Saoi by Aosdána and awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award For Achievement in International Literature. In 2018, she was made an honorary Dame of the Order of the British Empire. In 2019, O’Brien was presented with the David Cohen Lifetime Achievement prize, awarded every two years to a living writer for their entire body of work.
O’Brien won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2020 for her latest novel, Girl, set in Nigeria, which has also been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political fiction.
2020 marks the 60th anniversary of O’Brien’s acclaimed début novel, Country Girls.