Edna O'Brien  (b. 1936) Sin LINKS No links found. BIOGRAPHY Edna O'Brien (b. 1936)  O'Brien was born in a rural, Catholic village of about two hundred people in the west of Ireland and grew up on a farm. Educated at local schools and in a convent, she escaped rural life by briefly attending Pharmaceutical College in Dublin. Shortly after her marriage in 1952, she and her husband (Czech-Irish author Ernest Gebler) moved to London; they divorced after twelve years. O'Brien remained in London, where she raised her two sons alone. She has, since 1986, taught creative writing at City College of the City University of New York. Among her honors are the Kingsley Amis Award (1962) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1990). O'Brien's prolific output includes Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), The High Road (1988), The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1989), Time and Tide (1990), and most recently the novel Down by the River (1997). Among her half-dozen collections of stories are A Scandalous Woman (1974), A Fanatic Heart (1984), and Lantern Slides (1990). She has also written stories for juveniles, stage plays, television plays, and screenplays, and has been a contributor to magazines such as the New Yorker, the Ladies' Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan. Of the connection between her writing and her life, O'Brien says, "It is as if the life lived has not been lived until it is set down in this unconscious sequence of words."