The Country Girls Trilogy

As dramatised on BBC Radio 4, Edna O'Brien's iconic trilogy of novels - The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl and Girls in their Married Bliss - depicts the lives and loves of two girls in rural 1950s Ireland. Edna O'Brien's debut novels revolutionised Irish literature in the 1960s.

Edna O'Brien has written more than twenty works of fiction. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Arts Gold Medal, the Frank O'Connor Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award For Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. In 2021, Edna O'Brien was awarded the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She is currently writing a play, Joyce's Women, for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, to mark the centenary of the publication of Ulysses. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she has lived in London for many years.