Life
His upbringing was in a landed Catholic family in Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland. This later provided material for his first experimental novel, Langrishe, Go Down (1966). 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.
His career before writing started in the early 1950s, when he worked in London as a copywriter for Domas Advertising. While in London he met John Wright of John Wright's Marionette Co, and from 1958 to 1960 he worked as a puppeteer in Europe, South Africa and what was then Rhodesia. His last job before writing was working as a scriptwriter with the Filmlets, and advertising firm in Johannesburg.
His second major novel, Balcony of Europe(Taking its name from the village where he lived in Andalusia), utilizes Spanish and Irish settings and employs various languages, primarily Spanish and different English dialects(Irish, American, English). The novel was shortlisted for the 1972 Booker prize. The book has divided critics with some regarding the book as illusive and odd fitting in the canon of Higgins' major work. However the book has a small cult following(implying a "lengthly and irrational devotion") especially among fellow writers, commending the books originality and 'extraordinary range of styles'.
Later major novels include 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, utilizing a range of European languages in turns of phrase.
Read more about this topic: Aidan Higgins
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)
“Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you’re trying to say on stage.... Success makes life easier. It doesn’t make living easier.”
—Bruce Springsteen (b. 1949)
“I went back to my work, but now without enthusiasm. I had looked through an open door that I was not willing to see shut upon me. I began to reflect upon life rather seriously for a girl of twelve or thirteen. What was I here for? What could I make of myself? Must I submit to be carried along with the current, and do just what everybody else did?”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)