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:
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.””
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature—if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you—know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)