Award-winning Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston has died at the age of 95.
The celebrated author of dozens of novels and plays, who had been suffering from dementia in recent years, died on Tuesday night surrounded by family at a nursing home in Dún Laoghaire, her son Patrick Smyth said.
Born into a Protestant family in Dublin in 1930, her work touched on the Troubles, relationships between Catholics and Protestants and between Irish and British.
She published her first novel, The Captains and the Kings, in 1972. It was awarded the Evening Standard Award for Best First Novel.
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She published perhaps her best known novel, How Many Miles to Babylon, two years later. It is set during the first World War.
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Ms Johnston went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977 for her fourth novel Shadows on our Skin, set during the Troubles, and won The Whitbread Prize in 1979 for The Old Jest.
In 2012, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish Book Awards and she was one of the writers nominated in 2014 for the position of first Irish Laureate for Fiction.
She left Trinity College Dublin in 1951 without completing her degree in English and French after marrying Ian Smyth. She went on to receive an honorary degree from the university in 2001.
The couple had four children – Patrick, Sarah, Lucy and Malachi.
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Her son Patrick, a former Europe editor at The Irish Times, recalled his mother taking up writing in the 1960s as it was the only way “she could see of escaping the trap of domesticity and its isolation”.
She moved to Derry in the 1970s after meeting her second husband, solicitor David Gilliland, and returned to Dublin on his death in 2019.
A child of the playwright Denis Johnston and the actor and producer Shelah Richards, Ms Johnston wrote several plays including a stage adaptation of How Many Miles to Babylon and The Desert Lullaby.
Patrick said the passing of his mother “leaves a big void in our lives”.
“She passed on to her children a love of life, of curiosity, of fun, and a need to challenge. And love of books," he said.
“She once told an interviewer about her own childhood: ‘We read real books, right from the age of four up to 17. We also read history books. But it always seemed to me that history books were written by people who were trying to explain some enormous mess that we’d all got into but were never going to be able to explain. Whereas novelists can explain things in their own way. That’s why it’s so important that children read.’
“That is how we hope she will be remembered,” he said.
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