The celebrated Irish author Aidan Higgins has died, aged 88. The writer passed away in Kinsale on Sunday December 27.
Born in 1927 in Celbridge, Co Kildare, where he grew up, Higgins attained particular fame with his novel Langrishe Go Down, which was first published in 1966 and later adapted for a television film by Harold Pinter, starring Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons.
The novel, which was about a torrid love affair between a young German student and an older Irish woman, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Irish Academy of Letters Award.
Higgins is survived by his wife Alannah, children, Carl, Julien and Elwin, and a number of grandchildren.
President Michael D Higgins expressed his condolences on the passing of his namesake.
In a statement, President Higgins said
Aidan Higgins made an important contribution to Irish literature which was both groundbreaking and complex, and which will endure.
In a peripatetic life, Higgins lived in England, Spain, South Africa, Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe) and Germany, before settling for many years in Kinsale.
His first collection of stories, entitled Felo de Se, were recommended by Samuel Beckett to his London future publisher John Calder who published them in 1960. Other notable works of fiction by Higgins include Balcony of Europe, which was published in 1972 and was shortlisted for the then Booker prize.
Bornholm Night Ferry, was published in 1983. Higgins perfected a sensual, elegant style of writing, best exemplified in the aforementioned works, but also in his thrilling, meditative memoirs, Donkey's Years, Dog Days, and The Whole Hog, collected as A Bestiary.
Moving and wryly amusing by turns, Donkey's Years is one of the most beautifully resonant memoirs ever penned by an Irish author. It lyrically documents a quiet, country upbringing, as the mid-twentieth century approached, with a brilliant ear for dialogue and mischief.
The publishers, Dalkey Archive, currently hold much of Higgins' impressive ouevre on their list. John Calder, who originally published the author, was interviewed at the age of 87 by Totally Dublin in 2013. He declared at the time: "There’s another writer, an Irish writer, who I think is greatly under appreciated and that’s Aidan Higgins. He is a very strange man. A great writer, though."
Jeremy agus Judi ar Bhruach Na Siúire , a documentary about the making of the film of Higgins' novel, Langrishe, Go Down was broadcast last October on TG4.
