Faber to publish ‘landmark’ collection of Edna O'Brien's essays

Faber has announced plans to publish a “definitive” new selection of Edna O’Brien’s non-fiction essays, featuring previously unseen pieces.

Ecstasy, Uncertainty & Folly: Selected Non-Fiction will be edited and selected by O’Brien’s son, Carlo Gébler, alongside her editor at Faber, Lee Brackstone, who oversaw the final decade of O’Brien’s publishing before her death in 2024.

UK rights were acquired from Caroline Michel at PFD. Slated for hardback publication in summer 2027, the collection spans the author’s career over seven decades, curating for the first time her writing on literature, politics, culture and “matters of the heart”.

It will showcase investigative works of reportage – whether a dispatch from London’s East End docks, a feature on 1960s Cuba, or a controversial profile of Gerry Adams – alongside passionate literary essays and intimate personal pieces which “shine new light on one of our century’s cultural giants”.

Faber publisher Alex Bowler and head of classics and heritage, Ella Griffiths, said: “We are honoured to be publishing this landmark collection which will celebrate O’Brien as a superlative writer of non-fiction. Each piece is charged with her blazing originality: she is always, as in her extraordinary novels, a consummate stylist, and her work in all forms is driven by love: for people, stories and truth. It is a privilege to witness her development from a young author into the literary great we admire today, and we can’t wait for both devoted fans and new readers to experience her writing.”

Lee Brackstone described O’Brien as “the most magical and visionary person”.

“But that spirit and sensibility was grounded in a real understanding and compassion for the world, suffering, courage, political machinations and the realities which underpin our cultural endeavours,” Brackstone continued. “Spanning decades of her mostly lost (and some posthumous) non-fiction writing, this book presents a side of her less familiar to readers of her fiction and it is a privilege to have the responsibility to work on it with her son, Carlo.”

Gébler said: “Edna O’Brien is known for her fiction. But throughout her decades-long writing career, she also wrote non-fiction of all kinds. These pieces, mostly published in newspapers and magazines, are now to be retrieved from the dusty library shelves and museum stacks where they currently languish, and re-issued in this anthology. Ecstasy, Uncertainty & Folly, it is hoped, will offer readers of O’Brien the pleasure of discovering that a writer who they always thought could do one thing rather well, could also do something else just as proficiently. She could not only do fiction; she could also do non-fiction."

O’Brien wrote more than 20 prize-winning, bestselling works of fiction, including The Country Girls trilogy, as well as plays and four works of non-fiction, which have been translated into over 30 languages. O’Brien received the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature and the David Cohen Prize for Literature, as well as being appointed an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017. In 2021, O’Brien was also named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she lived in London for many years before her death in July 2024.