Tributes paid to Irish author acclaimed as a unique figure 'in the tradition of Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien'
'A great man of Irish letters' … Dermot Healy. Photograph: Dallan Healy
The Irish author Dermot Healy, whose poetry and novels drew him fans from Seamus Heaney to Roddy Doyle, has died aged 66.
The news was reported by Irish press, and confirmed to the Guardian by his editor and fellow poet Peter Fallon, who had known Healy since the early 1970s. "It's a shock – he's too young, and quite honestly we have had more than enough of that recently," said Fallon. The Gallery Press founder described Healy as "a true original", saying that whether he was writing poetry, novels, plays, or non-fiction, "what could not be escaped was his distinctive way of seeing and of saying, that was utterly trustworthy, because it was utterly his own".
Healy was the author of four collections of poetry, most recently A Fool's Errand, a book-length poem about the migration of barnacle geese from Greenland to an island by his home in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, which took him 12 years to write.
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The news was reported by Irish press, and confirmed to the Guardian by his editor and fellow poet Peter Fallon, who had known Healy since the early 1970s. "It's a shock – he's too young, and quite honestly we have had more than enough of that recently," said Fallon. The Gallery Press founder described Healy as "a true original", saying that whether he was writing poetry, novels, plays, or non-fiction, "what could not be escaped was his distinctive way of seeing and of saying, that was utterly trustworthy, because it was utterly his own".
Healy was the author of four collections of poetry, most recently A Fool's Errand, a book-length poem about the migration of barnacle geese from Greenland to an island by his home in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, which took him 12 years to write.
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