Members of political parties on Gotarrendura Corporation, Co. Avila, Spain, 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 of naming a street in Gotarrendura took place on a sunny day in June of this year when a plaque commemorating the links of Kate O’Brien with Spain was unveiled by the Irish Ambassador to Spain, Peter Gunning, in the village of Gotarrendura, Co. Avila, Spain. The Deputy Mayor of Limerick City, Jim Long, attended along with organisers of the Kate O’Brien Weekend Winter School.

Under a clear blue sky, with temperatures in the mid-20s, a large crowd of over three hundred people, including regional, county and local dignitaries, politicians, journalists, film crews and artists participated in the full programme of music and gastronomy organised for the event.

Kate O’Brien, pictured, who was born in Mulgrave Street, Limerick in 1897, is acknowledged to be one of the greatest women writers in English of the 19th and 20th centuries. Spain influenced her powerfully when she went there as a young woman working as a governess.

‘Farewell to Spain’ was published in 1937, a work which criticised Franco to such an extent that she was barred from entering Spain for 20 years. Her work was at one time banned in both Spain and Ireland.

In 1951, she published ‘Teresa of Avila’, a short biographical monograph of the saint, who she described as “a genius of the large and immensurable kind of which there has been very few.” Her best-known novel is ‘That Lady’, published in 1946 and set in sixteenth-century Spain.

During her lifetime several of her books were controversial. Her novel ‘Mary Lavelle’, published in 1936, which told the story of a young Irish woman travelling to become a governess in Spain and of the forbidden love affair she had there with a married man, was one of her novels banned in Ireland. Other works include ‘The Ante Room’, ‘The Land of Spices’, ‘The Last of Summer’ and ‘Without My Cloak’.

Kate O’Brien died in Canterbury, England, on 13 August 1974.