The film director Neil Jordan tonight receives this year's Irish Pen Lifetime's Achievement award. It is an inspired choice, recognising the quality of Jordan's fiction-writing.
Born in Sligo in 1950, he is the youngest recipient to date of the prize which has already honoured Brian Friel, the late J. B. Keane, Edna O'Brien, William Trevor and John McGahern.
Having begun his career with the 1979 Guardian Fiction Prize-winning collection, Night in Tunisia, published in Ireland in 1976, Jordan wrote two novels, The Past (1980) and The Dream of a Beast (1983), before turning to film.
An elegant, lyric writer with a strong sense of history, his loss to fiction would prove cinema's gain. He won an Oscar for his screenplay of The Crying Game. In 1998 he published Sunrise with Sea Monsters, and a new novel, Shade, appears later this year.
