Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My castaway this week is the writer Edna O'Brien for more than 45 years she has lived in the literary spotlight.

Described as a poet of heartbreak, her lyrical storytelling has excelled in capturing

the fragility and pain of the human condition, reflecting the drama of her own life as much

as the imagined journeys of her characters.

Born and raised in a small village in County Claire, her first and highly successful novel, The

Country Girls, was banned and indeed burned in the streets of Ireland

when it was first published in 1960. An uneasy relationship with her homeland continues to this day.

But, she says of Ireland Ireland it's in my roots and

when I dream at night it's the place I go. So Anne O'Brien 20 novels numerous

short stories, screenplays, biographies.

You've said in the past that if you were at peace, you wouldn't need to write, given that you are still writing,

presumably you're still not at peace.

I would still stand by that.

Writing is generated or caused by some unknown and indeed unnameable conflict or disturbance within one.

So that includes turmoil, but it also includes quest.

There is a quest for something so that I am both glad that I

have this urgency within me to make out of nothing some little thing.

Your identity of course as a writer cannot be separated from your identity as an Irish writer and given that you have

lived for so long mostly in London I mean 40 years or so you've lived in London why is

the that central part of your life that Irishness still as important to your identity or indeed is it still?

...