Healy is usually a synonym of Kerrisk or Kerrish, in Irish Mac Fhiarais i.e son of Ferris, the first to be so called being the son of one Pierce O'Healy.
G.P.A. Healy (1813-94), although born in Boston, was the son of a sea captain of Irish origin.
Timothy Healy (1855-1931) was the son of Maurice Healy, a clerk.
A weird, wonderful lunch hour I'm just back from a two-up reading by Alasdair Gray and DermotHealy, part of the Dublin Writers Festival.
Gray and Healy were doing their thing in Project - the trend/dated new name for the Projects Arts Theatre, or Centre, arr, whatever.
My SO, however is far more au fait with the Irish literary world, and recognised this sauced-up invalid as being Mr DermotHealy, author of the celebrated Goat Song.
Healy also regularly warns and reassures the reader about the honesty of his prose, as one might caution a visitor to that part of the country about the dangers that can lurk in all that green sameness.
When his wife is temporarily away and Dermot is still a child, the father innocently sleeps in the same bed with his son; during his teenage years, when the father is slowly dying of emphysema, the son sits silently by his father's side for hours, doing his homework.
Far from diminished by age, she has the moxie to kick her chamberpot the length of the hallway in the morning, ahead of her walker, and the mental vitality to be in awe of the idea of man going to the moon.
Healy quipped how he had viewed it as "suspect" because he had once been congratulated on winning the Nobel Prize by a man on the streets of Sligo.
Healy also has a role in the film 'The Map Maker', which is jointly funded by the Irish and Northern Irish film boards.
Healy was presented with the award by actor John Hurt, who described him as "someone who can write beautifully," before reciting his powerful poem about the Omagh bombing.
As Healy explains by phone from his home near Sligo, Sudden Times began as a short story that appeared 10 years ago in another journal, Cyphers: "I wrote the first piece in '89 and I left it alone.
Which is exactly what Healy did, looking in London for traces of the real-life story and finding a very different place than the city he lived in -- Healy lived there for 15 years before returning to Ireland.
Healy says he sought to avoid a "literary aspect," staying true to the voice and the character, which makes it especially painful when Ollie's perspective is undermined by other interpretations of the events that lead up to the nastiness.
Review of Dermot Healy's _Sudden Times_(Site not responding. Last check: )
The Irish writer DermotHealy has not yet attracted the international following his work merits, perhaps because his voice is strongly Irish, its wit and turn of language linked to place, the themes of his earlier books insular.
But in Sudden Times he constructs a novel whose theme is both particular and general, starting with the common response of humans in situations they cannot control–to endure and get through–into the intimate story of a small-time carpenter and his moral suffering.
We return to what seems to be a major theme in Healy’s work, something cracked open, irremediably broken–a character’s bruised heart, and the sense of identity and collective purpose.
Amazon.com: The bend for home: Books: Dermot Healy(Site not responding. Last check: )
Healy's lengthy dialogues are clearly novelistic, and his accounts, sometimes explicit, of randy teenagers, lascivious priests and ill and dying elderly villagers, although cliches of Irish autobiography, are given freshness here.
DermotHealy's "Bend for Home" is part "Portrait of the Artist" and part "Angela's Ashes," combining the ambient grey of Irish poverty with characteristic Irish humor.
Healy should be more widely read in America, if only because his is an original voice in a new key, Irish accent or not.
Amazon.com: A Goat's Song: Books: Dermot Healy(Site not responding. Last check: )
Healy's created worlds and the people that inhabit them are generally not people the reader would enthusiastically change places with, if places changed at all, ever.
Healy throws off his job as a teacher of Irish, for instance, in a paragraph; surely this could have been improved as a plot element, since he gives up a theatre gig for work that never receives afterwards any mention.
Healy does have talent but it appears in too scattered and mercurial patterns here for it to coalesce into an aesthetically cohesive or admirably rendered novel.
DermotHealy's poetry distils the essence of a gift he exercises more often and elaborately in other forms — for narrative, dialogue, characterization, and acute insight and observation.
In this new work — set in and around his home on the ocean's edge of Sligo, in London and further afield — he captures the every day's ordinary dramas and 'small habits', noting at the same time the hallway 'where something is after happening'.
Rough-edged and refreshing, The Reed Bed displays further instances of idiosyncratic comedy and convinces us of a singular capacity to be at once visionary, quirky and moving.
LOCAL writer DermotHealy has just had a new book of poems published and will be launching it this Friday night.
In “The Reed Bed” - set in Ballyconnell, London and further afield - Healy captures the everyday ordinary dramas and “small habits” noting at the same time the hallway “where something is after happening”.
Healy will read from his book on Friday night 7.30pm 7th of December in The Trades Club Castle St. Sligo.
He has written and directed plays, including The Long Swim, On Broken Wings and Mister Staines, and wrote the screenplay for Our Boys, directed by Cathal Black.
Cast: Brendan Coyle, DermotHealy, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Roy Larkin, Stephen Rea, Jake Williams
The film details the the life of an Irish Emigrant reminiscing about his life.
Now elderly and living in a London bedsit DermotHealy, the well know Irish writer, recalls these memories adapted and directed by Nicola Bruce in her debut feature from the photo/novel by Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke.
