Edna O'Brien, the radical Irish writer whose groundbreaking first novel "The Country Girls" was burned and banned in her native country, has died, her publisher announced on Sunday. She was 93.

"She died peacefully on Saturday 27 July after a long illness," said a statement from publishers Faber Books posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Faber called her "one of the greatest writers of our age."

Irish President Michael D Higgins said he had learned of the death of his "dear friend" O'Brien with "great sorrow."

She was "one of the outstanding writers of modern times" and "a fearless teller of truths," he said in a statement.

He added: "While the beauty of her work was immediately recognised abroad, it is important to remember the hostile reaction it provoked among those who wished for the lived experience of women to remain far from the world of Irish literature, with her books shamefully banned upon their early publication."

The honours she eventually received from her native Ireland included the Presidential Distinguished Service Award in 2018.

"The Country Girls" (1960), about the sexual initiation of rebellious Catholic girls, drawn from O'Brien's childhood experiences, is now a marker in modern Irish literature for its breaking of social and sexual taboos.

O'Brien was born in 1930 into a strict Catholic farming family in west Ireland's County Clare.

She was educated at a convent school and then in Dublin where she graduated with a pharmacist's licence in 1950, around the time she was discovering a passion for Leo Tolstoy, F Scott Fitzgerald and TS Eliot.

In 2018, she won the prestigious PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, honoured for having broken down "social and sexual barriers for women in Ireland and beyond."

In 2021, France made her a Commander in the "Ordre des Arts et des Lettres," the nation's highest cultural distinction. (AFP)