2024-10-13
34 分钟Kirsty Young talks to Irish novelist, playwright and poet Edna O'Brien, in a programme first broadcast in 2007. Edna O'Brien died in July 2024, aged 93.
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Lauren Laverne here.
We're taking our summer break, so until we're back on air, we're showcasing a few programs from our archive.
As usual, the music's been shortened for right reasons.
This week's guest is the writer Edna O'Brien, who died in July.
Kirstie Young cast her away in 2007.
My castaway this week is the writer Edna O'Brien.
For more than 45 years, she has lived in the literary spotlight.
Described as a poet of heartbreak, her lyrical storytelling has excelled in capturing the fragility and pain of the human condition, reflecting the drama of her own life as much as the imagined journeys of her characters.
Born and raised in a small village in County Clare, her first and highly successful novel, the Country Girls, was banned and indeed burned in the streets of Ireland when it was first published in 1960.
An uneasy relationship with her homeland continues to this day.
But, she says of Ireland, it's in my roots, and when I dream at night, it's the place I go.
So, Edna O'Brien, 20 novels, numerous short stories, screenplays, biographies.
You've said in the past that if you were at peace, you wouldn't need to write.
Given that you are still writing, presumably you're still not at peace.
I would still stand by that.
Writing is generated or caused by some unknown and indeed unnamable conflict or disturbance within one.
So that includes turmoil, but it also includes quest.
There is a quest for something, so that I am both glad that I have this urgency within me to make out of nothing some little thing.
Your identity, of course, as a writer cannot be separated from your identity as an irish writer.