John McGahern, widely praised as Ireland’s greatest living novelist, who specialised in semi-autobiographical portraits of rural life, died on Thursday in a Dublin hospital after a long battle with cancer, his family and friends said. He was 71.
McGahern published six novels, four collections of short stories and, last year, his non-fiction Memoir. All reflected on his upbringing in impoverished County Roscommon — a world dominated by powerful love for his mother, who died of cancer when he was just eight, and thereafter the twin tyrannies of the Roman Catholic Church and his father, a police sergeant who repeatedly beat the boy and his five sisters.
McGahern’s second novel, The Dark published in 1965, was banned in Ireland and denounced from the pulpit as pornographic.
He was forced to quit teaching and left Ireland, but resettled five years later near his childhood home by a lakeside in County Leitrim bordering Northern Ireland. There he wrote his two most celebrated works, Amongst Women — nominated for Britain’s Booker Prize in 1990 — and That They May Face the Rising Sun in 2002. — Sapa-AP