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Celebrated Irish novelist and short-story writer Edna O’Brien’s early works were banned in her home country when they first appeared because of the frank portrayal of the sex lives of their characters. Today, O’Brien is widely seen as changing the face of Irish fiction, and among her many awards are the Irish Pen Lifetime Achievement Award and the Ulysees Medal.

O’Brien published her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960, and has since written more than 20 novels alongside biographies of James Joyce and Lord Byron. Among her most recent works is a collection of short stories Saints and Sinners and the biography Byron in Love.  In The Country Girl, O’Brien looks back at her life, at how she was driven into exile after publication of her first novel, and at her encounters with Hollywood giants, literary masters and pop stars. It is a story of a life well lived but also one of painful and poignant memories.

Here she talks to Robert Hewison, theatre and arts writer for The Sunday Times, and author of some 20 books in the field of 19th- and 20th-century cultural history. His most recent work, with Chris Orr, is Chris Orr: The Making of Things.

‘What a banquet indeed. A book of magics, truths, stories, and quiet immensity. No one else could have written it, and no one else could have lived it. The book is a poetic testament to what Scott Fitzgerald called our “capacity for wonder”.’ Andrew O’Hagan