Edna O'Brien

O'Brien grew up in a strict, convent-educated corner of rural County Clare, trained as a pharmacist, and moved to London after a bruising marriage to the writer Ernest Gébler, whose jealousy of her sudden success and a vicious custody fight over their two sons shadowed her for years. She wrote The Country Girls in three weeks; published in 1960, it was banned by the Irish censorship board and, in her home village, publicly burned by the parish priest.

The scandal made her a pariah at home and a literary sensation abroad. She kept writing prolifically for six more decades (novels, plays, and screenplays), returning often to Irish women's constrained interior lives, and received major late-career honors before her death in 2024, having lived to see the country that once banned her books claim her as one of its own.