A short life of the author
Aidan Higgins (1927–2015) was born in Celbridge, County Kildare. He spent much of his life abroad — in London, Johannesburg, Berlin, and Spain — and his fiction reflects a restless, cosmopolitan sensibility at odds with the dominant traditions of Irish fiction.
Life and Career
Langrishe, Go Down (1966) — about four sisters in a decaying Kildare house in the 1930s — won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and established Higgins as a major stylist. Harold Pinter adapted it for television in 1978. The prose is dense, sensuous, and formally ambitious in ways that owed nothing to the Irish realist tradition of the time.
Balcony of Europe (1972) — set in an artists’ colony in Andalusia — is his most openly autobiographical novel and his most demanding: a sustained exercise in consciousness rendered through language of extraordinary rhythmic complexity.
Major Works and Themes
Higgins wrote about exile, memory, sexuality, and decay. His prose is closer to Beckett and the European modernists than to any Irish tradition. He was deeply influenced by painting and music, and his sentences have a textural density that rewards rereading.
Key Works
- Langrishe, Go Down (1966) — James Tait Black Prize
- Balcony of Europe (1972)
Collecting Higgins
Langrishe, Go Down first edition (Calder and Boyars, 1966) brings $100–$250. Higgins’s later work was published by small presses (Secker & Warburg, Minerva). He is undervalued by collectors.