Novelist John McGahern is the winner of this year's Irish PEN/A.T. Cross Award.
The prize, now in its fifth year, and which honours the life achievement of writers nominated by their peers, will be presented tonight at a dinner in Dublin.
Mr McGahern, who was born in 1935, is one of the few living Irish writers who is now as respected at home as he is abroad.
The author of six novels including his outstanding debut, The Barracks, published in 1963, the 1990 Booker runner-up, Amongst Women, and That They May Face the Rising Sun published last year, he is also a gifted short story writer.
Of the 34 stories published in four collections to date, several are superb, while one, "The Country Funeral" published in the Collected Stories (1992) is magnificent.
His work revolves on a gesture, an entire life may be evoked in a single incident. Few writers can imbue the unspoken with such eloquence.
Although he has increasingly come to be seen as a chronicler of Irish rural life, McGahern began his career with darkly introspective stories dominated by outsider figures riven by sexual angst and religious guilt. By daring to write about such taboo subjects in the more repressed Ireland of the 1960s he earned himself official censure and saw his second novel, The Dark (1965), banned. Having earned the disapproval of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid's Catholic regime, he compounded this by marrying a divorced woman.
Dismissal from his teaching post in a north Dublin school followed. McGahern had joined a long and honourable list of important Irish, and international, writers.
In ways his artistic development has run parallel with the evolution of modern Irish society.
In common with the late John B. Keane, the first winner of this Irish PEN award, McGahern is both social commentator and story-teller.
Both writers share a close regional affinity to their chosen place. McGahern's landscape is that of Roscommon and the watery Leitrim lakeland so well evoked in That They May Face The Rising Sun.
It is ironic that the bleak honesty that was initially viewed as McGahern's major sin against his given society, has now become his virtue.
No one would appreciate the irony more than McGahern, a shrewd, intelligent individual possessed of an intellectual sophistication he prefers to conceal behind the easy-going demeanour of a countryman jovially ill at ease in the big city.
In addition to John B. Keane, previous winners are Brian Friel, Edna O'Brien and William Trevor.
