Spain Culture News
Kate O'Brien to be honoured in Ávila, Spain
By h.b.
May 7, 2008 - 3:45 PM

The Gotarrendura Town Hall unanimously voted last October,2007, to name a street in the town after the Irish writer Kate O’Brien to mark her long association with Spain and the land of Teresa of Avila.

The formal ceremony will take place on Saturday, 7th June,2008.
Kate O’Brien, who has been described as the best novelist Limerick ever produced and who is considered to be among the greatest women writers in English of the 19th and 20th centuries, was born in Born House, Mulgrave Street, Limerick, on 3rd December 1897.

Spain influenced her so powerfully not only because she happened to go there when she was very young, but because she felt naturally akin to the land of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.

In 1951, she published "Teresa of Avila", a short biographical monograph of the saint, whom she described as "a genius of the large and immensurable kind of which there has been very few and the only one woman."
"Humanity could not give what she could, and all that she was died with her."
- Kate O’Brien on St.Teresa of Avila.