Tributo a Edna O’Brien (1930-2024)

Resumen

One of the greatest writers to emerge from post-Independence Ireland, Edna O’Brien, died 27 July 2024 at the age of 93. In the last decade of her life, she accumulated some of the highest honours a writer can receive, including the David Cohen Prize (referred to as the UK / Ireland Nobel Prize for Literature; 2019), the PEN American Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), and France’s highest arts honour, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2021). She was also made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to literature (2017). Had she died even twenty-five years earlier, the opening sentence of this tribute would have seemed ludicrous to most influential voices in “official” Ireland. It is only since the turn of this century that O’Brien started to be appreciated in her own country, largely thanks to the efforts of the Irish Studies community of scholars, who began to take her writing seriously as a subject of critical inquiry in the mid-1990s.