Figures from the world of literature and beyond mark the passing of a gifted Irish novelist.
Seamus Heaney
Poet and Nobel laureate
It is a great personal loss. I have known him for more than 40 years and to think of him and Madeline in their house by the lakeshore was to be reassured that there was a place in the world where the best standards for living and writing would be maintained. McGahern not only did good work himself, he established high standards for others, standards of artistic excellence and personal integrity that worked silently and strongly within the entire literary community.
I see him as the heir of Synge and Beckett, a writer who was on a secret errand from the beginning. He was strict in his judgment, sympathetic in his understanding , courageous in the face of personal difficulties and always capable of merriment and grace .
As Yeats said, we shall not see that self-same excellence again.
Jennifer Johnston
Novelist
The king is dead.
It's so hard, first hearing the news, to think coherently about him.
The man himself, so gentle, funny, angry, and truly honest. I think it was the honesty of his writing that first held me. He didn't play games like almost all the rest, he played it like it was.
His anger didn't abate, but was tempered by his huge compassion, not just for his characters, but for poor, struggling Ireland. His work was at once pastoral and universal, both his short stories and novels.
And we are so lucky to have his brilliant Memoir, not just a great memoir, but a love story for his mother. He ends it with the following words: "I would want no shadow to fall on her joy and deep trust in God. She would face no false reproaches. As we retraced our steps, I would pick for her the wild orchids and windflower."
So beautiful, so generous, so McGahern.
Dear John, may your coffin be covered by wild orchids and windflower.
You have done everything that a writer should do. It will be a long time before your like comes again. We have been so lucky to read you and know you.
Annie Proulx
Writer
I hope John McGahern has gone straight to some writer's minimalist heaven, a pleasing room with a table, a chair, a cupboard of good paper, a rich pen and generous ink, for I can't bear to think of a universe without his stories.
John Banville
Novelist and Booker prize winner
John McGahern was an exemplary figure. His dedication to his art was a spur for writers of his own generation and especially for the generation after theirs. We admired his courage, resourcefulness and humour in the face of life's trials - and John, especially in the early days, had more than his share of troubles. His loss is a sorrow.
He was a master of what he called plain prose, and his aim always was to depict the commonplace world in as simple and direct a manner as possible. The quiet ecstasy he achieved in his finest works, such as the novel Amongst Women - his masterpiece, surely - was or should have been a lesson to us all.
An enduring memory I have of him is of being taken for a ramble one summer day over his farm by the lake in Co Leitrim where he lived out his final years and where, I suspect, he found that happiness he had been searching for all his life. We stopped to survey what to my citified eyes was a plain field, but John showed me, with tact and tenderness, how wrong I was.
McGahern's meadow was a place of simple splendour, with countless species of grasses and wildflowers that I would not have seen until John let me look through his eyes. Thomas Hardy, a poet whom McGahern admired and whom in ways he resembled, asked that posterity should remember him as a man "who noticed such things". There was nothing that John did not notice, and celebrate.
Colm Tóibín
Novelist
I am really sad at John's death. The idea that his great, careful voice has been stilled makes this a black day. He was a man of the greatest integrity, and every word and sentence he wrote and re-wrote reflected that. He was also one of the most engaging and funniest people I have ever met.
Alasdair MacLeod
Writer
His work was quite wonderful. He was able to capture the life of certain people at a certain time in Irish history. In addition to being a specific writer from a specific place, he was also universal in that he was able to understand the complexities of the human heart and make them known to the larger world. No one else will ever have his literary fingerprints .
Roy Foster
Historian and biographer
His uncompromising artistic integrity was not only reflected in his remarkable body of work, but in his very survival as a writer after his scandalous victimisation by the Censorship Board and the school authorities who sacked him for writing The Dark. If any of those responsible are still around, I hope they have the grace to attend his funeral. His achievement helped end a bleak era for Irish writers, and his work will live.
Joseph O'Connor
Novelist
My parents had his books in the house when we were teenagers. I remember, especially, his 1978 collection of short stories, Getting Through. There was a story in it called Sierra Leone which was like nothing I had ever read. I was awestruck by its simplicity. I still remember one of its lines: "Her hair shone dark-blue in the light."
The strange ache in the heart caused by quiet, precise words; I used to copy bits of that story out into my school jotter every other night, simply to know how it felt to write something so beautiful.
Eventually, I started changing a word here and there, altering the punctuation, the characters' names, putting in events from my own life, people I knew, or dialogue I'd heard in school. Over the course of maybe 10 years, every trace of his graceful prose was squeezed out and the resulting desecration became a story of my own.
Every subsequent Irish writer owes him a great debt, but his readers all over the world owe him more.
Eavan Boland
Poet
I first came on his work through The Barracks. I was a student then. It was the first time the down-to-earth powerlessness of an Irish woman seemed faithfully, beautifully, angrily portrayed in a way I could believe. From that moment, he seemed to me one of the most progressive and truthful of Irish writers.
Terence Brown
Author and academic
John McGahern will continue to be remembered and celebrated as one of the most remarkable practitioners of the short story form in the 20th century. He took the basic material of Irish experience and made it high art.
Olive Braiden
Chair of the Arts Council
John McGahern's brilliant, touching and often witty prose never failed to move readers. His life experience and insight into the human condition was such a great help to us in the Arts Council, to which he was appointed in August 2003.
He only spoke when he had something to say and what he said was always important.
He was wise and kind, ever-sensitive to the needs of artists, and dogged in his determination at the council table to improve the situation for artists in this country.
President Mary McAleese
Ireland has lost an outstanding literary talent. John made an enormous contribution to our self-understanding as a people. His work often pitched him into a place of some discomfort, not only for himself but for the reader also. His was a challenging voice yet not without compassion, a voice that spoke of his great and honest love for his country and its people.
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern
John McGahern faithfully lived out his vocation as a writer. The early sacrifice he paid for his work strengthened his resolve. His talent however, was not tied to any passing celebrity. Through decades, he slowly, meticulously and beautifully crafted some of the finest passages of literature ever written on this island.
John O'Donoghue
Minister for Arts
John was the true successor to Joyce in the pantheon of great Irish writers. He was part of an age that could not be understood without his insightful writings. He was the voice of a whole generation and his work will long endure.
John McGahern, despite being aware of his poor health, continued to serve with distinction on the Arts Council. He was a man of high principle and remarkable courage, and was not one who was ever inclined to bend a knee.
Neil Belton
John McGahern's editor at Faber and Faber
Working on Memoir with John was the greatest experience of my life as an editor. I was a pupil at Belgrove National School in Clontarf when John was teaching there, and I was there when he was driven out. It was thus very special for me to work on Memoir with him, both because of that reason and because I admired him so greatly as a writer. Memoir was one of the most beautiful books I will ever publish.
Michael D Higgins
Labour Party president, former minister for arts
John was a formidable talent, arguably Ireland's finest writer, and a man of strong convictions and beliefs. For those of us who had the privilege to know him personally, one could not but be struck by the profound humanity with which he connected the integrity of the life and the integrity of the work - most movingly in Memoir.