Hello and welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

I'm Harriet Gilbert host of the BBC's World Book Club and in this bonus episode

we hear from the greatly loved and admired Irish author Edna O'Brien, who died on the 27th of July.

Edna O'Brien was born in rural County Claire in 1930.

Feeling suffocated by her convent education, she moved to Dublin to escape,

and subsequently spent much of her life in London. She published her first novel, The Country Girls,

in 1960. The story of two young women friends, its groundbreaking portrayal of female

sexuality scandalised Ireland, and 16 years ago she joined us to talk about the novel with

readers around the world and in the studio.

Edna O'Brien, welcome to the World Book Club.

Thank you. I'm delighted.

It's getting on for half a century now since you wrote the country girls.

Do you feel somewhat detached and remote from it?

Well, not really really because whatever you write whether it's 10 minutes

ago or 48 years ago is sort of in your consciousness and also those two girls were my start off in life as a

writer. I'd always wanted to write and apparently I was once in a book shop in Galway when I was still a pharmacy student.

And they had photographs of writers along the wall, Samuel Beckett, Sean O'Casey, and I said,

oh, rather arrogantly, oh, I'll be there one day.

Well, I don't remember saying that they tell me I did. I don't feel it

distant because Ireland although the characters Kate and Baba are the pulse of

the novel, the character is also the country, Ireland and that landscape

which has been sometimes troubling for me but is also a very very deep inspiration.

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