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:
“The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness—rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“A woman can get marries and her life does change. And a man can get married and his life changes. But nothing changes life as dramatically as having a child. . . . In this country, it is a particular experience, a rite of passage, if you will, that is unsupported for the most part, and rather ignored. Somebody will send you a couple of presents for the baby, but people do not acknowledge the massive experience to the parents involved.”
—Dana Raphael (20th century)
“Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)