Irish writer Edna O'Brien awarded $68K David Cohen Prize, a lifetime achievement award
Novelist, playwright and short story writer Edna O'Brien has been awarded the 2019 David Cohen Prize for Literature, a £40,000 ($68,732 Cdn) award that recognizes an Irish or U.K. author for their body of work.
The prize described O'Brien as "one of the greatest writers of the 20th century."
"Some writers blaze early, then fade, publishing later books far below their best. In contrast, Edna O'Brien has achieved a rare arc of brilliant consistency, her literary skill, courage and impact as apparent in a novel published as recently as September as in her first book, which appeared 60 years ago," said judge chair Mark Lawson in a statement.
Her debut was the novel The Country Girls, published in 1960. Following the intimate lives of two young women, the book was banned in Ireland for sexually explicit content and was burned by O'Brien's parish priest. Despite the controversy, she continued to write provocative, passionate literature, all of it infused with the texture and atmosphere of Ireland.
"I had no fear whatsoever in writing it. All the fears and upset and brouhaha came after the publication of the book. It was deemed, in my own country, a smear on Irish womanhood," she told Eleanor Wachtel on Writers & Company in 2009.
"I think the reason it created such a furor was that there hadn't been a tradition of women writers in my country, or perhaps in many countries."
She followed up The Country Girls with two sequels, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss, and three more novels, all of which were banned in Ireland.
"I had dreamed all my life of being a writer. I would say the words to myself out in the fields: 'I will be a writer,'" said O'Brien in 2009.
"Then I became a writer and sticks and stones were what happened. That doesn't mean I'm not glad and ever thankful that I can write, but I didn't contemplate or even think what would happen on publication."
O'Brien persisted and her critically acclaimed body of literature now spans over 40 works of fiction, short story collections, plays, poetry nonfiction and children's books.
Two of her most recent are novels, 2015's The Little Red Chairs and 2019's Girl, both of which explore real world atrocities. The Little Red Chairs tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a mysterious stranger, who turns out to be a Serbian war criminal. Girl is written in the voice of a young Nigerian girl abducted by Boko Haram.
In 2018, O'Brien received the PEN/Nabokov Award for achievement in international literature.