Ireland’s “greatest living writer” Edna O’Brien is celebrating her 90th birthday today by delivering a specially-streamed lecture for Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. O’Brien has already filmed the 2020 TS Eliot lecture on the writer and James Joyce ahead of its 7.30pm premiere on the theatre’s YouTube channel streamed from the Irish Embassy in London. Ambassador Adrian O’Neill will introduce the lecture and there will be a post-event interview with O’Brien and Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, while actor Sinéad Cusack will perform Eliot’s `Rhapsody on a Windy Night’. O’Brien said of the lecture, “It was supposed to be 15 minutes but it came in at 150 minutes. I’m glad I did it but it took an awful lot out of me.”
