Aidan Higgins

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

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. 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. 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. 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.

Higgins died aged 88 on 27 December 2015 in Kinsale.

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.

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.

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, 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.

• Felo de Se – Somin Trust Award, 1963
• Langrishe, Go Down – James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1967
• DAAD scholarship of Berlin, 1969
• American Irish Foundation grant, 1977
• D.D.L., National University of Ireland, 2001