‘A beacon of brazenness and defiance’: Edna O’Brien remembered by Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín and more

The acclaimed author of The Country Girls, which was burned in the market square of her home town, has died aged 93. Here, Irish novelists pay tribute to a titanic figure who liberated their country’s fiction

O’Brien blew open the possibilities for Irish fiction, not because of the taboos she broke but because she had broken them as a woman. In 1960, her first novel The Country Girls was burned in the market square of her home town of Scarriff, and every Irish woman who has published since is indebted to the hurt she took on there.