The face of modern Irish society has transformed more in the past century than during any other period of its history.

While the obvious struggles, successes and failures of politics and economics have taken the center stage on the global theater, there has also been a cultural revolution. As the unique Irish spirit has encompassed all facets of it's society, it is through the voices of literary leadership her people have maintained their unique spirit.

The voice of the transformation of Irish woman has been Edna O'Brien, the recipient of The Ireland Funds 29th Literary Award.

Presiding over the awards ceremony at O'Reilly Hall on the campus of University College Dublin, Chairman of The Ireland Funds Advisory Committee, Dr. Maurice Hayes praised this national treasure. He said of the Literary Award, "If you look back over the years it really is an honors list of modern Irish writing." Adding to a long list which includes Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, Dr. Hayes described O'Brien as a person who has a sustained output of writing of great quality and intensity and poetic feeling going back over forty years; a person who has been ground breaking in her approach to Irish literature.

O'Brien's first book, The Country Girls, written in 1959, enraged so many people in Ireland that it was considered an attack on Irish women and subsequently banned. Since that first turbulent reception, she has written 17 novels. Most recently she completed a biography of James Joyce.

Her approach to literature blossomed from a keen awareness and connection to her environment, with its magical and mystic beauty. Combined with her strong sense of womanhood and liberated courage, she has become a role model for young Irish women.

Born in County Clare, O'Brien spent her youth there before attending school in Galway. "The environs where I come from are a haunted place. A place that has given me my stories, and a connection with both the earth itself, the place itself and the living, and I even think the dead," she began before the assembly in O'Reilly Hall. In Grace Eckley's 'Edna O'Brien' she declares "Clare is an enchanting place. I'm interested in the bones and the stones of the place."

While O'Brien claims this strong connection to Ireland, it has caused some sense of contradiction from domestic critics. She has not lived in Ireland since 1959. However, her research into her Irish characters is thorough, and the effects of her early years in the west of Ireland have deeply imprinted on her soul. Of course, she is not the first Irish writer subject to such judgement. If there were a residency requirement, Joyce, Beckett and even Yeats would be on the fence. It is as if being Irish is a state of the spirit rather than some tangible act of presence in the land.

Criticism has never deterred Edna O'Brien from the call to her art. "Writing is a hazardous thing and it requires from the writer a sense of independence, and if you like danger that is not always welcome or agreeable. Because the difference between what the writer wants to say and unearth, the excavation that the writer wants to do and what the world and the community and even ones own friends expect, is a quite big divide. The writer must keep faith with the thing she or he was born to do."

This faith allowed O'Brien in 1959 to live through the burning of her first book by the priest in her local parish. Locals were encouraged from the pulpit to bring their copies down to be destroyed. This simply fueled O'Brien's literary fire, and her second book was published to even greater outrage.

Fellow writer Polly Devlin discussed the extraordinary sensuality of O'Brien's writing, which in the beginning, was so repressed in Ireland. "It shows how far we have come, in Ireland. For example, it was not available to me, when I was trying to buy it in Ireland," said Devlin.

"Her first books have caused us to look at ourselves and our society in an entirely new light," reiterated Maurice Hayes.

The examination of one's country and its people is not an easy task. "A writer must consider the psyche, the soul, the pulse, the danger, the wounds, the sins, the mirth, the sorrows and everything else of ones country, and then write it in a language as pure and as deep as the place you are writing about", said O'Brien.

To create a true voice of the people language is what distinguishes an Irish writer from the rest of the world. Polly Devlin, in her introduction at the 29th Literary Award praised the "extraordinary number of voices that have arisen from Ireland, and the extraordinary sound that has come from Ireland that in a way, has played the tunes for the world. And sometimes above the general sound Irish writers have made, there are other unique voices. I think that Edna O'Brien's is one of these."

"We are blessed in this country with a kind of gift of language," said O'Brien in her acceptance speech. "It is both English language and Irish English language, and actually I think it is unique in the world we live in where language is dull, corporate and viciated. Language is the richest thing we have and language is what excites us."

Receiving the award, O'Brien joked humbly about the thoughtfulness of The Ireland Funds. "I do not receive many prizes so I am rather excited," she said. However, among her honors past are the Kingsley Amis Award (1962), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1990) and the European Prize for Literature in recognition of her life's work (1995). But in Ireland she still does not receive the recognition critics elsewhere believes she rightly deserves. For this reason, to be named alongside previous recipients of The American Ireland Fund Literary Award such as Austen Clarke, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland and John B. Keane is a great honor.

In closing, O'Brien shared advice she was given as a young writer. "The eyes of the writer, meaning the sensibility, are like the headlamps of a motor car on a dark and dangerous and very often secret road," she said. "So I am hoping to do a few more journeys on that secret and dangerous road. And now that I have new wealth I am bound to be able to do it with more ease."

written by Rory Keohane

The AIF is grateful to the O'Neil family of Florida
who fund this award annually.