Josephine Edna O'Brien DBE (15 December 1930 – 27 July 2024) was an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer.

Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), has been credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland after the Second World War.

[7] From 1941 to 1946, O'Brien was educated at St. Raphael's College, a boarding school run by the Sisters of Mercy[7] in Loughrea, County Galway,[8] a circumstance that contributed to a "suffocating" childhood.

[10] In 1950, having studied at night at a pharmaceutical college and worked in a Dublin pharmacy during the day,[11] O'Brien was awarded a licence as a pharmacist.

Shortly after their publication, the books were placed on the censorship index and banned in her native country because of their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters.

[15] It had been claimed that copies of The Country Girls were burned when it was published, but an investigation in 2015 found no witnesses or evidence and it was concluded that the story was probably not true.

Her fourth novel, August Is a Wicked Month (1965), in which an unhappily married woman has a "sensual awakening on the French Riviera", was excoriated in the press and banned in Ireland.

Her parents were vehemently against all things related to literature and her mother strongly disapproved of her daughter's career as a writer.

[12] Alongside Teddy Taylor (Conservative), Michael Foot (Labour) and Derek Worlock (Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool), O'Brien was a panel member for the first edition of the BBC's Question Time in 1979, and was awarded the first answer in the programme's history ("Edna O'Brien, you were born there", referring to Ireland).

It was subsequently performed in the West End of London, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, starring Maggie Smith, and directed by Robin Phillips.

In the Forest (2002) dealt with the real-life case of Brendan O'Donnell, who abducted and murdered a woman, her three-year-old son, and a priest, in rural Ireland.

She travelled to that country twice to do research, which included interviewing numerous people, from "escaped girls, their mothers and sisters, to trauma specialists, doctors and Unicef".

She later said that she had tried to create a "kind of mythic story from all this pain and horror", and was disappointed by its poor reception in the US, although it was well-received in France and Germany.

O'Brien regarded Girl as a continuation of the focus of her career, "to chart and get inside the mind, soul, heart and emotion of girls in some form of restriction, some form of life that isn't easy, but who find a way to literally plough their way through and come out as winners of sort – maybe not getting prizes – but come through their experiences and live to tell the tale.

[23] Her work includes references to Irish lore and history, and mentions of distinctive geographic features such as Druids' circles, Inis Cealtra, and Lough Derg, County Donegal.

The library was to hold papers from O'Brien covering the period of 2000 to 2021,[29] including correspondence, drafts, notes and revisions.

[28] In 1954, O'Brien met and married, against her parents' wishes, the Irish writer Ernest Gébler, and the couple moved to London in 1959, where, as she later put it, "We lived in SW 20.

[24]) The press often portrayed O'Brien as a "party girl", with American magazine Vanity Fair calling her "the playgirl of the western world".

[9] Irish president Michael D. Higgins, also a writer and poet, wrote: "Through that deeply insightful work, rich in humanity, Edna O'Brien was one of the first writers to provide a true voice to the experiences of women in Ireland in their different generations and played an important role in transforming the status of women across Irish society".

[41] Others who hailed her as one of the greatest writers of her time included John Banville, Michael Ondaatje and Ian McKellen.

[43] Her collection Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award,[44][22] with judge Thomas McCarthy referring to her as "the Solzhenitsyn of Irish life".

In 2024, Higgins remembered her "election as Saoi, chosen by her fellow artists, was the ultimate expression of the esteem in which her work is held".