July 28 (UPI) -- Irish storyteller Edna O'Brien, whose debut novel "The Country Girls" gained her international literary acclaim and recognition, has died at 93, the Taoiseach announced Sunday.
The novel raised eyebrows when it was released in 1960. It was the first part of a trilogy that told the fictional tales of friends Kate and Baba, starting in their school days and strict Roman Catholic upbringing in the Irish countryside, to their adulthood and failed marriages in London.
It was unabashedly direct and intimate and was a departure from strict literary norms during that time. She was criticized in Ireland, which was largely conservative at the time.
"Ireland has lost an icon," a statement from the Taoiseach Simon Harris said Sunday.
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"Edna O'Brien was a brave, gifted, dignified and magnetic person. She wrote her debut novel The Country Girls in just three weeks. Sixty-four years on it is not only a remarkable piece of work but still a landmark moment for Irish women and society. The book would be banned and burned but Edna O'Brien would never be silenced."
O'Brien published 20 books over her career, all of them with themes of joy, sorry and unrequited love.
"O'Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul," Booker Prize winner Anne Enright wrote of her in the Guardian in 2012.
O'Brien described her writing as "breathing," the Taoiseach said, and told interviewers that she wanted to go out as someone who spoke the truth. She had been promoting the trilogy in recent years.
