Following the death of the Irish author Edna O’Brien in July 2024, another chance to hear a 2008 World Book Club episode in which she talked to Harriett Gilbert and an audience of readers about her renowned debut novel The Country Girls. Banned in her homeland on publication, it has become one of O’Brien’s most admired and renowned works. Producer: Oliver Jones Image: Edna O'Brien, pictured in 2009 at the Hay Festival (Credit: David Levenson/Getty Images)
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Hello, this is the BBC World Service.
I'm Harriet Gilbert with a special edition of World Book Club to mark the death this July of the great Irish author Edna O'Brien.
Here's another chance to hear her talking about her scandalous debut novel, the Country Girls.
I say scandalous because when it was published in 1960, the book's portrayal of the sex lives of two young women friends provoked so much controversy that copies were actually burned.
But time moves on and the novel had become a much loved classic when 16 years ago, Edna O'Brien came to World Book Club to talk about it with readers around the world and in the studio.
Edna O'Brien, welcome to the World Book Club.
Thank you.
I'm delighted it's getting on for half a century now.
Since you wrote the Country Girls, do you feel somewhat detached and remote from it?
Well, not really, because whatever you write, whether it's 10 minutes ago or 48 years ago, is sort of in your consciousness.
And also those two girls were my start off in life as a writer.
I'd always wanted to write and apparently I was once in a bookshop in Galway when I was still a pharmacy student.
And they had photographs of writers along the wall, Samuel Beckett, Sean O'Casey.