The Literary Legacy of Edna O’Brien

Leading authors and filmmakers discuss their favourite Edna O’Brien books at this special event at Belfast Book Festival.

From her trailblazing trilogy The Country Girls to taboo-breaking novels such as A Pagan Place, Edna was one of Ireland’s most acclaimed and influential novelists.

Our panellists include Sinéad O’Shea, director of Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, and authors Eimear McBride, Eoin McNamee and Jan Carson.

Hosted by journalist Alex Clark, this celebratory event will appeal equally to Edna fans and readers keen to explore her work and literary legacy. 

Jan Carson is a writer based in Belfast. She has published three novels, three short story collections and two micro-fiction collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. Jan’s latest novel, The Raptures was published by Doubleday in early 2022 and was subsequently shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her short story collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses was published by Doubleday (UK) in April 2024 and Scribner (US) in July 2024. Her writing has been aired on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and RTE. She is the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast 2025 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first stage play, an adaptation of the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, was produced by Replay Theatre Company at the Lyric Theatre, in 2025. Her next novel, Few and Far Between, is forthcoming in early 2026.

Eoin McNamee is the author of eight novels including The Bureau (Quercus, 2025), Resurrection Man, later filmed, and the Blue Trilogy. His work has been nominated for and won many major prizes including the Man Booker Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Kerry Fiction Prize, the Imison Award and the CWA Steel Dagger. Liam McIllvaney said of McNamee's prose that it has the 'cadenced majesty of McCarthy or DeLillo, but the vision it enacts is all his own.' Most recently, Eoin was part of the writers room for Netflix’s Vikings Valhalla series.

Eimear McBride is the author of four novels: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and The City Changes Its Face. She held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading and is the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize, Kerry Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Sinéad O’Shea is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. She wrote and directed Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story which is the most successful documentary at the UK and Irish box offices this decade. Her previous features, Pray for Our Sinners and A Mother Brings Her Son To Be Shot have won acclaim and awards all over the world. Previously Sinead wrote and directed films for Al Jazeera English, BBC, and The Irish Times. She was a profile writer for Publishers Weekly and reported from Ireland for The New York Times.