Edna O’Brien: The woman who defied a nation

Edna O’Brien’s early novels shocked Ireland which plotted its revenge. Her first novel The Country Girls was banned and she had to withstand the whispering of the establishment that she didn’t write her own novels.

Her career would be a rebuttal to the cynics and the priests, but her life had its share of trauma and despair. In the 1970s she began an affair with a renowned and married British politician whose identity has never been revealed. She was consumed by the relationship, unable to work or think of anything else. A new documentary Blue Road tells the remarkable story of Edna O’Brien. On Free State today, Blue Road’s director Sinead O’Shea talks about the Edna O’Brien she got to know at the end of her life and why she remained so fiercely independent. She looks at O’Brien’s life ridiculed and castigated by the establishment, firstly for writing about sex and then for writing about Gerry Adams.

Sinead also tells the story of the acid trip that altered Edna O’Brien’s life forever when she had to be rescued by James Bond.

Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning is a Gold Hat Production in association with SwanMcG.

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