The Irish writer Edna O’Brienknown for her revolutionary and feminist literary work, died on Saturday at the age of 93, her representative and publishing house announced today.

Edna O’Brien died “peacefully on Saturday, July 27 after a long illness,” according to a message from Caroline Michel’s representative and her publisher, Faber, posted on the latter’s X platform account.

“Edna O’Brien was one of the greatest writers of our time,” “she revolutionized Irish literature, sketching women’s lives and the complexities of the human condition in prose that was bright and simple, and which had a profound effect to so many writers who followed her,” the announcement added.

The Irish president Michael D. Higginsin his announcement he described her as “one of the most outstanding writers of our time”, paying tribute to the “magnificent” writer, gifted with the “moral stature to confront Irish society with realities that have long been ignored”. a “fearless truth teller”, and dear friend, as she calls her.

Twice nominated in France for the Médicis and Femina awards for foreign fiction, in 2013 for her autobiography “The Country Girls” (in Greek “Koritsia apó din Γαμηρηση” from Glaros publications) and in 2016 for her novel “The Little Red Chairs” (“The Little Red Chairs” from Kleidaritmos publications), the Irish author received the literary “PEN/Nabokov Awardone of the most important American PEN awards, for “breaking down social and sexual barriers against women in Ireland and far beyond”.

The jury of the Femina Award awarded her a special award for her body of work in 2019.

Her first novel, “Country Girls”, a story of the sexual initiation of two girls, caused a scandal in 1960 in her homeland, the then strictly Catholic and conservative Ireland. The book is banned from sale in Dublin bookshops and sometimes ends up at the stake for “lack of religion and pornography”. Her next six novels would suffer the same fate.

In her almost twenty novels, the Irish author presents her country as a violent and backward character. With her raw and lyrical language, Edna O’Brien explores the privacy of women sacrificed by an education she describes as repressive and medieval.