Born: September 27th, 1951
Died: September 9th, 2024
The life of Fred Johnston, who has died suddenly at his home in Galway a few weeks short of his 73rd birthday, was a template for anyone seeking to carve out a career in the arts, particularly poetry.
In Galway, his adopted home city, he made a very significant contribution to this art form when he established – working with Dick Donaghue, then director of the Galway Arts Centre – the Cúirt Festival of Poetry in 1986-87, and, more widely in literature, when he set up in 2002 the Western Writers’ Centre, which he directed for several years.
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From the time he left secondary school, St Malachy’s College in Belfast, he lived life very much on his own terms, settling in Dublin in 1969 where he sought out as many artistic figures as he could in the literary and musical scenes. He earned a precarious living, sub-editing with The Irish Press group, and in a PR firm.
Like all Irish cities and towns of that period, Dublin was much poorer than it is today in forms and expressions of the arts, and performance and exhibition spaces.
Among the people he befriended were brothers Peter and Jim Sheridan, who were a driving force behind the Project Arts Centre, and Neil Jordan, who was involved in setting up the Irish Writers’ Co-Operative with Peter Sheridan.Sheridan recalls that Johnston was “very much involved [in both] on the fringes”.
Johnston was also showing promise himself as a writer. He was awarded a Hennessy Prize in the New Irish Writing section of the Irish Press in 1972, then edited by David Marcus.
The judges included VS Pritchett, the famous British master of the genre, and James Plunkett, author of the novel Strumpet City, and the acclaimed collection The Trusting and the Maimed. Johnston’s first book of poetry, Life and Death in the Midlands, and his first collection of short stories, Portrait of a Girl in a Spanish Hat, were published in 1979.
In 1978, Johnston went to Galway on a two-week creative writers’ workshop conducted by Anthony Cronin. He never left, attracted to its thriving traditional music scene. Music was in Johnston’s blood: his mother, May Martin, was a well-known figure in musical theatre in Dublin in the 1940s. A talented musician himself, he learned the guitar and banjo while at St Malachy’s, and loved the work of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. At just 16, he produced his own LP of rebel and Glasgow Celtic songs in the year Celtic won the European Cup (1967).
Johnston played music in Galway’s pubs, and busked at the railway station. He would also often bring his portable typewriter along in a shopping bag, typing up poetry he and other would-be writers had composed, and selling them to anyone who would buy for five pence a sheet. He also founded an arts festival one summer while living in the flats at Rahoon.
His early years in Galway were punctuated by a year spent in Algeria, where he developed his love of French. He later became a translator of the work of the Senegalese poet Babacar Sall and the Breton Colette Witorski.
He was awarded the Prix de l’Ambassade by the French government in 2000, enabling him to spend an extended period in Paris. In 2004, he was writer-in-residence at the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco.
In 1986, he approached the Galway Arts Centre with his proposal for a festival of poetry, Cúirt, to draw in writers from international as well as Irish sources. Initially rebuffed, he worked with Dick Donaghue to launch it the following year, with unexpectedly successful results: its closing session, featuring British poet John Cooper Clarke and Paul Durcan attracted 400 patrons.
His own writing career was burgeoning at this time. In total, Johnston produced three novels, four volumes of short stories, nine books of poetry, and a theatre play. He also developed a career as a critic, writing for Poetry Ireland, The New Statesman, The Spectator, The Irish Times and Harper’s and Queen magazine.
His most important literary legacy will probably be his poetry, which tended to be concerned with observations of ordinary life, infused with social concern, and he was critical of what he saw as an insufficient connection in contemporary Irish writing with wider society.
In more recent years, Johnston taught creative writing at NUI Galway from 2016.
Johnston’s family background was unconventional. His father, Fred snr, was a Methodist trade unionist, and they lived in Canada during his early childhood, but moved back to Belfast when Fred snr returned to look after the family bakery business.
Writing on the Condolences section of RIP.ie, Declan Varley of The Galway Advertiser, an old friend and supporter, commented that, “for decades more, works will be written because of all that Fred did in his adopted city”.
He is survived by his partner, Mary Ellen Hodgins Fean, and her daughters by a previous marriage, April and Sylvia.