In one of the last broadcast interviews, the acclaimed Irish author Edna O’Brien, who died aged 93 in July 2024, is in conversation with Kim Chakanetsa. In this bonus episode, shediscusses her final novel, Girl – which tells the story of a young girl in Nigeria who is captured by the Islamist group Boko Haram – the effects of lockdown and her love of writing and literature from around the world… (Recorded in 2020)
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Hello and welcome to World Book Club from the BBC World Service.
In this bonus episode, we thought you'd like to hear one of the last broadcast interviews with the acclaimed Irish author Edna O'Brien, who died aged 93 in July 2024.
Recorded in 2020, she's in conversation with Kim Chakonetsa.
She discusses her final novel, Girl, which tells the story of a young girl in Nigeria who's captured by the Islamist group Boko Haram.
She also talks about the effects of lockdown and her love of writing and literature from around the world.
Edna was born in the west of Ireland in 1930.
Her first novel, the Country Girls, was not just banned but burned in Ireland, criticised for its vivid depiction of the inner thoughts, desires and sexual lives of young women.
That was in 1960 and Edna is still writing her latest book, Girl Crosses Continents and Cultures to tell the imagined story of Mariam, a young Nigerian girl captured by the militant Islamist group Boko Haram.
Edna, welcome.
Edna, I understand that you spent some time in northern Nigeria researching the novel Girl.
Yes, indeed, I would have to.
There would be no way I could write Girl without going to Nigeria and spending quite a lot of time just getting first of all a sense of the landscape, then meeting people, endeavoring to meet some girls who had escaped Boko Haram, meeting people from NGOs from, you know, UNICEF, from different organizations, and ultimately meeting some girls that had escaped, or some.
Not the girls, not the Chibok girls who were eventually let out with the government, you know, a swap between Boko Haram, because they were.