Irish writer Edna O'Brien has died aged 93 after a long illness.
O'Brien's novel The Country Girl (1960), about the sexuality of unruly Catholic girls, inspired by her childhood experiences, is a landmark in Irish modern literature for its breaking of social and sexual taboos.
The writer was born in 1930 in a strict Catholic farming family in the western Irish county of Clare.
He was educated at a convent school and then in Dublin, where he graduated with a pharmacist's license in 1950, around the time he discovered his passion for Leo Tolstoy, Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Stearns Eliot.
In 2018 she received the prestigious PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, recognized for breaking down "social and sexual barriers for women in Ireland and beyond".
In 2021, France made her the recipient of the "Order of Arts and Letters" - the country's most prestigious cultural award. | English
