Later Years
Ben visited Omagh in 2001. This was marked by the unveiling of a plaque outside his childhood home on Gallows Hill by Omagh's Plain Speaking Community Arts group. In an interview at that time, when asked about censorship, Ben remarked with a typical quip: "If you weren't banned, it meant you were no bloody good."
In September every year in Omagh, an event called The Benedict Kiely Literary Weekend is held to celebrate the author's many achievements.
In 2005, Ben married his partner of over 40 year, Frances Daly.
Read more about this topic: Benedict Kiely
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“The years of imprisonment hardened me.... Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn’t be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life, I no longer have the emotion of fear. ... there is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.”
—Winnie Mandela (b. 1936)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)