Northern Ireland

Edna O'Brien marks 90th birthday with broadcast lecture for Dublin's Abbey Theatre

Edna O'Brien pictured in Belfast ahead of a previous lecture in the Ulster Museum. Picture by Bill Smyth
Edna O'Brien pictured in Belfast ahead of a previous lecture in the Ulster Museum. Picture by Bill Smyth Edna O'Brien pictured in Belfast ahead of a previous lecture in the Ulster Museum. Picture by Bill Smyth

EVEN as she celebrates her 90th birthday today Ireland's "greatest living writer" Edna O'Brien isn't slowing down, marking the occasion with a specially-streamed lecture for Dublin's Abbey Theatre.

The author has already filmed the 2020 TS Eliot lecture on the writer and James Joyce ahead of its 7.30pm premiere on the theatre's YouTube channel streamed from the Irish Embassy in London.

Ambassador Adrian O'Neill will introduce the lecture and there will be a post-event interview with O'Brien and Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan, and actor Sinéad Cusack will also perform Eliot's `Rhapsody on a Windy Night'.

Having done the hard work, the nonagenarian will be spending the day with one of her sons while others watch the event online.

"I'm going to see my agent and my son Sasha, and there will be one other person - I hope that's allowed," she told the Observer which gave her the accolade of `Ireland's greatest living writer'.

"My other son, Carlo (Gebler), lives in Enniskillen so he can't come."

She describes the Eliot speech as "great and gruelling".

"I'm not used to giving lectures and I did worry about it.

"I wanted to give a sense of the poetry, the person, the mystic and the sometimes quite cruel man without making it into a gossip piece.

"It was supposed to be 15 minutes but it came in at 150 minutes. I'm glad I did it but it took an awful lot out of me."

The novelist is also on the publicity trail with her new book `Girl', the name harking back to her debut, `The Country Girls'.

Her last book is a novel about the girls kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram, for which she made two trips to the sub-Saharan African country, speaking to "escaped girls, their mothers and sisters, to trauma specialists, doctors and Unicef".

O'Brien told the Observer she still hopes to complete one final book.

"I do have one in mind but I'm not sure I have the energy or the existence to carry me through.

"I don’t know if I'll manage it but I do know that I have always written with truth and feeling. I have not abandoned those qualities ever, and I never will."