Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien is sitting in front of me. You can talk to me for 30 minutes she says in that famous County clare burr mixed with an almost aristocratic Englishness.

I've met her before. The John Hewitt bar, May 2006 at the 7th Cathedral quarter arts festival.

She's about to be interviewed on stage by Martin Lynch. She's running late, and so by the time she gets there, there's no time for me to do a short interview for the radio arts programme. So I stay and watch Martin Lynch swoon under her legend and grab her at the bar afterwards. Well you can't grab Edna O'Brien. She's so gracious. She allows you into her orbit. 

 I'm mesmerised by her. Her poise, grace and total self assurance. And yet she tells me during the interview that one of the memories that haunted her in the aftermath of the publication of "Country Girls" in 1960, and the book burning and the censorship, was her family back home telling her how much she had shamed them. She still feels the sting of that comment more so than the ash of her book outside a church. 

She's been in London since the sixties and she dresses like she's on a swinging Carnaby street. It suits her. Black ruched dress with a white enamel flower brooch dead centre. A shaggy black shrug over her shoulders. The only concession to her age is a stick which she says she has left in the other studio. No I don't need it now. She just wants to make sure she doesn't leave without it.

I remark that I'd read that Faber & Faber have bought the rights to her autobiography. It's a memoir she gently corrects me. Much nicer idea. Memoir, memory. That's what she's going to be doing for the next 18 months. Writing it and reading nothing but other people's memoirs.

When she was writing her play "haunted", the reason she's in Belfast as it had just opened in the Grand Opera House the night before, she said she read nothing but plays. The restoration dramatists and Shakespeare.

Before the interview started she had leant towards me. Can you help me? Yes. I need an aisle seat on the flight back to London tomorrow. Don't understand this online booking system.

So as I get the green light from the producer on the other side of the glass to start the interview, my head is full of priests burning "Country Girls" and online airline booking forms.

And yes the booking was done. How could we not make sure the woman who Philip Roth called "the most gifted woman now writing in English" got her leg room?