“Where’s the whisky?” asked Edna O’Brien unashamedly, peering into the specially-thrown ceramic vase presented to her, esteemed recipient of the Charleston-Chichester Award For A Lifetime’s Excellence In Short Fiction.

First published in her native Ireland in 1960, O’Brien’s novel The Country Girls was ceremonially burned by the local catholic priest.

Her mother told her she should be kicked naked through the town.

“I’d only written about two girls bursting out for life!” said O’Brien, revealing indignation still at 83, though hindsight tells her her mother must have been frightened for her reputation in the parish, and for O’Brien’s immortal soul as well.

There was an appreciative hush in the barn as she read a story from her latest collection The Love Object, having described her effort to keep the momentum, fervour and dedication of her younger self alive in her writing.

Exiled in London to this day, she said she would do it all again but with a typist: “My little world sustains me still”. She knew no books at home, only Mrs Beeton’s cookbooks – she can but wonder at an intellectual upbringing like Virginia Woolf’s.

Asked, why write? she replied unhesitating: “Why breathe?...Literature is the soul of the world”.