Dermot Healy

Dermot Healy (born 1947) is an Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer. A member of Aosdána, Healy is also part of its governing body, the Toscaireacht. Born in Finnea, County Westmeath, he lives in County Sligo, and has been described variously as a "master", a "Celtic Hemingway" and as "Ireland's finest living novelist".^[1][2][3]

Often overlooked by North American readers 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.^[4][5]

Often overlooked for the more mainstream awards throughout his career (he has been completely ignored by the Booker Prize which has instead awarded admirers such as Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright), Healy has 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 selected 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.^[6]

Life

Healy was born in Finnea, 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 a labourer. He later returned to Ireland, settling in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, a small settlement on the Atlantic coast.^[4]

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.^[4][7] He writes in a shed (though, on being a writer, has been quoted as saying "I know writing is what I do but I still don't see myself as one") and is fascinated by etymology.^[8]

List of works

Fictions

• Banished Misfortune (London, Allison & Busby, 1984), collected short stories
• Fighting with Shadows (London, Allison & Busby 1984)
• A Goat's Song (London, Collins Harvill, 1994)
• Sudden Times (London, The Harvill Press, 1999)
• Long Time, No See (Faber and Faber, 2011)

Autobiography

• The Bend for Home (Harvill, 1996)

Plays

• Here and There and Going to America (1985)
• The Long Swim (1988)
• Curtains (1990)
• On Broken Wings (1992)
• Last Nights of Fun (1994)
• Boxes (1998)
• Mister Staines (1999)
• Metagama (2005)
• A Night at the Disco (2006)

Poetry

• Neighbours' Lights (1992)
• The Ballyconnel Colours (1995)
• What the Hammer (1998)
• The Reed Bed (2001)
• A Fool's Errand (The Gallery Press, 2010)

Film

• I Could Read the Sky (1999)

References

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External links

• Dermot Healy at Aosdána
• Dermot Healy at Irish Writers Online