
Blue Road
The Edna O’Brien Story
A portrait of one of the world’s greatest and most charismatic writers, Irish author Edna O’Brien.
When author Edna O’Brien, then a young unpublished novelist, described a tar road as ‘blue’, her partner Ernest Gébler was enraged, insisting that a road could never be blue. But as this tenderly empathetic documentary clearly shows, on a hot summer day a road can indeed be blue, its shimmering surface reflecting the sky above. It was just a sentence but Gébler’s rage continued to burn as the fiercely intelligent Edna became increasingly successful as an author, quickly surpassing his own fame, and becoming a darling of the mid-20th century cultural and literary scenes. Although O’Brien eventually left the embittered Gébler, the shadow of male violence that was so incensed by her impulse to write continued to be a theme in the now-celebrated author’s life. Centred around a rich archive of period interviews and a conversation with O’Brien in 2024, shortly before her death, Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is a siren song to the act of writing and its transportative powers, for both writers and readers.
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