Occupation Writer Name Dermot Healy | Role Novelist | |
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Genre Novel, play, poem, short story Notable works A Goat's Song,
Sudden Times,
Long Time, No See Died June 29, 2014, County Sligo, Republic of Ireland Movies I Could Read the Sky, The Guard, Our Boys Awards Encore Award, Tom Gallon Award People also search for Cathal Black, John Michael McDonagh, Nicholas Bruce, Ron Aslan, Iarla O Lionaird Books A Goat's Song, The bend for home, Sudden times, Long Time - No See, A Fool's Errand | ||
Dermot healy radio interview 2012
Dermot Healy (9 November 1947 – 29 June 2014) was an Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer. A member of Aosdána, Healy was also part of its governing body, the Toscaireacht. Born in Finea, County Westmeath, he lived in County Sligo, and was described variously as a "master", a "Celtic Hemingway" and as "Ireland's finest living novelist".
Contents
- Dermot healy radio interview 2012
- Dermot healy an appreciation from cavan theatre festival
- Life
- Style
- Fictions
- Autobiography
- Plays
- Poetry
- Film
- References
Often overlooked outside Ireland due to his relatively low public profile, Healy's work is admired by his Irish literary predecessors, peers and successors alike, many of whom idolise him—among the writers to have spoken highly of him are Seamus Heaney, Eugene McCabe, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe and Anne Enright.
Throughout his career left out of the running for literature's bigger mainstream awards (not even longlisted for the Booker Prize which was instead awarded to admirers of his such as Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright), Healy won the Hennessy Award (1974 and 1976), the Tom Gallon Award (1983), and the Encore Award (1995). In 2011, he was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award for his 2010 poetry collection, A Fool's Errand. Long Time, No See was nominated for the International IMPAC Literary Award, the world's most valuable literary award for a single work in the English language, by libraries in Russia and Norway.
Dermot healy an appreciation from cavan theatre festival
Life
Healy was born in Finea, County Westmeath, the son of a Guard. As a child the family moved to Cavan, where Healy attended the local secondary school. In his late teens he moved to London and worked in a succession of jobs, including barman, security man and as a labourer. He later returned to Ireland, settling in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, a small settlement on the Atlantic coast. He died at his home on 29 June 2014, while awaiting an ambulance after suddenly being taken ill. He was laid to rest at Carrigans Cemetery following funeral mass by Fr. Michael Donnelly at St Patrick's Church in Maugherow.
Style
Healy's work is influenced by an eclectic range of writers from around the world, including Anna Akhmatova, John Arden, Isaac Babel, Bashō, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter, J. M. Coetzee, Emily Dickinson, Maria Edgeworth, T. S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Nâzım Hikmet, Aidan Higgins, Miroslav Holub, Eugène Ionesco, Franz Kafka, Mary Lavin, Federico García Lorca, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson. Healy wrote in a shed (though, on being a writer, was quoted as saying: "I know writing is what I do but I still don't see myself as one") and was fascinated by etymology.