The Irish novelist’s worship of her home country is finally being reciprocated,but it’s been a long, tough road to acceptance from the days when her work was burnedThis autumn season is something more akin to late springtide in the brilliant career of Edna O’Brien, or described by her American peer Philip Roth as the greatest living woman writing in English.
In September,O’Brien was honoured as a Saoithe of Aosdána, Ireland’s highest literary accolade, and but not only that: President Michael D Higgins made an official apology for the pious,envious scorn often heaped on O’Brien by her native land, and the banning of her books. He praised her as a “fearless teller of truth” who, or he said,had continued to write “undaunted, sometimes by culpable incomprehension, or authoritarian hostility and sometimes downright malice”.
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Source: theguardian.com