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Aidan Higgins

Aidan Higgins
Higgins at home in Kinsale, 2007
Higgins at home in Kinsale, 2007
Born(1927-03-03)3 March 1927
Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland
Died 27 December 2015(2015-12-27) (aged 88)
Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland
OccupationWriter
GenreFiction
Literary movementModernism
Notable awardsJames Tait Black Memorial Prize
SpouseAlannah Hopkin

Aidan Higgins (3 March 1927 – 27 December 2015) was an Irish writer. He wrote short stories, travel pieces, radio dramas and novels.[1] Among his published works are Langrishe, Go Down (1966), Balcony of Europe (1972) and the biographical Dog Days (1998). His writing is characterised by non-conventional foreign settings and a stream of consciousness narrative mode.[2] Most of his early fiction is autobiographical – "like slug trails, all the fiction happened."[3]

Life

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Aidan Higgins was born in Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland. He attended local schools and Clongowes Wood College, a private boarding school. In the early 1950s he worked in Dublin as a copywriter for the Domas Advertising Agency.[4] He then moved to London and worked in the light industry for about two years. He married Jill Damaris Anders in London on 25 November 1955.[5] From 1960, Higgins sojourned in Southern Spain, South Africa, Berlin and Rhodesia. In 1960 and 1961 he worked as a scriptwriter for Filmlets, an advertising firm in Johannesburg.[4] These journeys provided material for much of his later work, including his three autobiographies, Donkey's Years (1996), Dog Days (1998) and The Whole Hog (2000).

Higgins lived in Kinsale, County Cork, from 1986 with the writer and journalist Alannah Hopkin. They were married in Dublin in November 1997. He was a founder member of Irish artists' association Aosdána.[1]

Higgins died aged 88 on 27 December 2015 in Kinsale.[6][7]

Works

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His upbringing in a landed Catholic family provided material for his first novel, Langrishe, Go Down (1966). The novel is set in the 1930s in a run-down "big house" in County Kildare, inhabited by the last members of the Langrishe family, three spinster sisters, Catholics, living in not-so-genteel poverty in a once-grand setting. One sister, Imogen, has an affair with a German intellectual, Otto Beck, which transgresses the moral code of the time, bringing her a brief experience of happiness. Otto's intellectual pursuits contrast with the moribund cultural life of mid-20th-century Ireland. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and was later adapted as a BBC television film by British playwright Harold Pinter, in association with RTÉ. Langrishe also received the Irish Academy of Letters Award.[1]

His second major novel, Balcony of Europe, takes its name from a feature of the Spanish fishing village, Nerja Andalusia, where it is set. The novel is carefully crafted, and rich in embedded literary references, using Spanish and Irish settings and various languages, including Spanish and some German, in its account of the daily life in the beaches and bars of Nerja of a largely expatriate community. The protagonist, an artist called Dan Ruttle, is obsessed with his friend's young American wife, Charlotte, and by the contrast between his life in a cosmopolitan artistic community in the Mediterranean, and his Irish origins. The book was re-edited in collaboration with Neil Murphy and published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2010, with the Irish material cut, and the affair between Dan Ruttle and Charlotte, foregrounded.[8]

Later novels include the widely acclaimed Bornholm Night Ferry and Lions of the Grunwald. Various writings have been collected and reprinted by the Dalkey Archive Press,[9] including his three-volume autobiography, A Bestiary, and a collection of fiction, Flotsam and Jetsam, both of which demonstrate his wide erudition and his experience of life and travel in South Africa, Germany and London, which gives his writing a largely cosmopolitan feel, utilising a range of European languages in turns of phrase.

Awards

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Bibliography

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Selected criticism

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Book

Essays and Reviews

References

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  1. ^ a b c "'Aidan Higgins'". Irish Writers Online. Archived from the original on 23 May 2013. Retrieved 9 February 2012.
  2. ^ Golden, Sean (1983). "Parsing Love's Complainte: Aidan Higgins on the Need to Name". Review of Contemporary Fiction. Retrieved 6 February 2014.
  3. ^ Murphy, Neil (5 March 2010). Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form. Columbia University Press. pp. 3–5. ISBN 978-1564785626.
  4. ^ a b Grantham, Bill (1983). "Aidan Higgins (3 March 1927–)". In Halio, Jay L. (ed.). Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 14. Detroit, MI: Gale Research. pp. 389–394.
  5. ^ "Higgins, Aidan, 1927–". Contemporary Authors. Vol. 148. Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale. 2006. pp. 194–198. ISBN 078767902X.
  6. ^ McGarry, Patsy (28 December 2015). "Acclaimed Irish writer Aidan Higgins dies aged 88". The Irish Times. Retrieved 6 October 2020.
  7. ^ "Celebrated Irish writer Aidan Higgins dies aged 88". RTÉ. 28 December 2015. Retrieved 28 December 2015.
  8. ^ O'Farell, Kevin (22 September 2013). "Phenomenological fiction: Aidan Higgins via Edmund Husserl". Irish University Review. 43 (2): 363–380. doi:10.3366/iur.2013.0085. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 6 February 2014.
  9. ^ Murphy, Neil, Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form, Dalkey Archive Press.
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