With great sadness we announce the death of our friend and author aged 88.
With him, our publishing house loses one of its most important authors and who was described by The Times Literary Supplement as “a missing link between the modernist period and contemporary writing.”
Born in Celbridge, Co Kildare, in March 1927 he was from a well-off Catholic background and attended Clongowes Wood College (which James Joyce also attended) before beginning work as a copywriter for an advertising agency in Dublin. He then moved to London in the mid 1950’s working various jobs until traveling broadly, including Spain, South Africa, Berlin, Rhodesia, and South Aftrica.
His novels include Langrishe Go Down (1966, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), Balcony of Europe, Scenes from a Receding Past (1977), and Bornholm Night-Ferry (1983), all of which are available from Dalkey Archive Press. Also published by Dalkey Archive are A Bestiary, Blind Man’s Bluff, Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air, Flotsam and Jetsam, and Windy Arbours.
Writing about him in 2010 for The Irish Times, poet Derek Mahon wrote, “he was never an ivory tower man, not even in Langrishe, Go Down, though perhaps he is something of an ‘elitist’ – a designation he would, I suspect, be proud to endorse, so long as we recognise the radical nature of this elitism . . . His reputation for much of his working life has been a fugitive one, a thing of hearsay among initiates . . .”
John Banville wrote in The New York Review of Books, “With writers such as Higgins—if, indeed, there be other such—nothing is lost, nothing wasted, and his own work is precisely that—his own—the components of it his to revise, recycle, reuse.”
John O’Brien, his friend and publisher, said upon hearing of Aidan’s death, “He is clearly the writer in the direct line of descent from Joyce and O’Brien to Beckett. In terms of his use of language, I don’t think there is a writer who could produce a line of prose equal to Aidan’s, who made it all seem so effortless. He has certain passages that must rank with the finest lines of prose ever written in English. I will sorely miss him.”
Dalkey Archive Press plans to re-issue his March Hare and to publish a final collection of his critical writings.
Our thoughts are first of all with the writer Alannah Hopkin, his wife, and also his family and close friends.
