As Edna O’Brien said on receiving the American Ireland Fund Literary Award in 2000: “A writer must consider the psyche, the soul, the pulse, the danger, the wounds, the sins, the mirth, the sorrows and everything else of one’s country, and then write it in a language as pure and as deep as the place you are writing about.” Long years as an expatriate living in London did not stop her setting novel after novel in the land of her birth. She made Ireland, and in particular Co Clare, as vivid a presence to her readers as her human characters.
If there was a fine line between this sense of place and the Celtic kitsch of which some accused her, she was often enough on