On The Town: All eyes were trained on the door of the Irish Writers' Centre for the arrival of the elusive writer, Desmond Hogan.
"He's a solitary individual. He writes about the people he befriends, the people on the margins, and he's most comfortable with people on the edge, the homeless, the nomads, the gypsies," said Antony Farrell, of Lilliput Press, who hosted the celebration of the publication of Hogan's Larks' Eggs: New and Selected Stories. "He grew up in Ballinasloe in east Galway, which is a fixed point in all his writings. He's very charming, very strange."
If you read Hogan "you'll be able to reconstruct the Irish psyche, that great fragmented soul that is the Irish person", said playwright and artist Gerard Mannix Flynn, who was there to launch the book. "Take any page of Desmond Hogan's work and you are into every aspect of the human condition. It's profound reading . . . You are dragged through a massive amount of emotions.
"Everything is sculpted and cut. There is no grandiosity, and happiness is viewed with suspicion . . . It's the real world and his towering presence is in that world."
As friends gathered to hear the writer read, solicitor and writer Ronan Sheehan described Hogan as "a writer of great lyrical intensity and a visionary in a traditional, romantic way. He's a writer of great fidelity to his own culture, to Ireland". Sheehan's latest work, a translation of Catullus, the "very erotic" Latin poet from the first century BC, will be published next year, he said.
Others who came along were software consultant Hughie Hallahan, Vivienne Shields, from Ranelagh, and writer Bill Barich with his partner, painter Imelda Healy. Other admirers of Hogan's work included writer Philip Casey; Peter Duffy, of Irish Organic Herbs; and health practitioner and yoga teacher Lainey Ennis.
Larks' Eggs: New and Selected Stories, by Desmond Hogan, is published by Lilliput Press