Chancellor, Members of the University, Distinguished Guests;

Aidan Higgins was born in Celbridge, County Kildare in 1927, and went to school nearby at Clongowes Wood College. He has always had a great fondness for the people and the countryside of his native Kildare. I am told that to this day, when he travels from Cork to Dublin, his heart rises when he reaches the familiar flat landscape, tall trees and large skies of his native Kildare. Had anyone told him in his youth that he would eventually become a resident of County Cork, he would have been highly sceptical.

While Aidan may be considered as a reluctant Corkman, or a Kildare man transplaced, Cork, and in particular Kinsale, has been good to him as a writer, providing him with a quiet, comfortable base which is obviously conducive to work. Since moving to Kinsale in November, 1986, Aidan Higgins has added no fewer than seven books to his already considerable body of work.

Aidan Higgins’ first work of fiction, a collection of stories entitled Asylum, appeared in 1960. Through a friend in Greystones, the musician John Beckett, Aidan’s work was brought to the attention of Samuel Beckett, who liked what he saw, and advised its author to “despair young, and never look back”. As it happens, he has never stopped looking back: memory and its reworking are among his great strengths as a writer.

As he himself has written, he is consumed by memories. His birthplace, Springfield House, was to become the setting of his best-known novel, Langrishe, Go Down. The novel, published in 1966 by John Calder, was an immediate success. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Irish Academy of Letters Award, and was filmed for television with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Only later, when Aidan started to write his trilogy of memoirs in the 1990s did he reveal that the sisters who feature in Langrishe were in fact based on his three brothers. The three volumes of Memoirs – Donkey’s Years, Dog Days and The WholeHog reveal Aidan’s epic memory, a true novelist’s memory which involves all the senses – touch, taste, hearing, smell and visual details, all relayed in a prose style that is remarkable for its precision.

As a writer, Aidan Higgins has always been true to his own vision, or to the vision of Rory of the Hills as he names his alter ego in the memoirs. And reading these memoirs, following the tracks of Rory the Wanderer, is often indistinguishable from reading a Higgins novel. The reader is taken on an unpredictable journey, often quite literally, as his books move with ease between different countries and different continents.

This same uncompromising nature can be observed in the way that Aidan chooses to live. He has never learnt to drive, a legacy perhaps of an alarming day that he spent while working in light industry in London, attempting to control a fork lift truck. His home in Kinsale has no television, and he continues to write on a manual typewriter, leant to him by a friend in Spain back in the 1960s. He consciously resists the activity of “word-processing”, treasuring as he does, the odd happy accident that occasionally results from mistyping.

Aidan Higgins chooses to live as he does not because he has fallen behind the times, but in as a conscious resistance to the easy path.

During the first part of his life Aidan travelled broadly. He left Dublin in the early fifties for London, later embarked on a two-year tour of Europe and Africa with John Wright's Marionette Company, an experience which Aidan later vividly recreated in Images of Africa.

Aidan spent most of the sixties and seventies outside Ireland, chiefly in Berlin and Spain, and was a European long before the EU gave a new meaning to the word. Balcony of Europe, published in 1972, and shortlisted for that year’s Booker Prize, was, like much of Higgins’ work, way ahead of its time. But even though his work is apparently more European than many Irish writers, it is also thoroughly rooted in the Irish experience.

Aidan Higgins returned to Ireland for good in 1980, when membership of Aosdana provided a basic income, thus bringing an end to many years of financial uncertainty. As well as his own prolific output, Aidan has done much quiet work, behind the scenes, helping and encouraging younger writers, including Dorothy Nelson, Dermot Healy and Neil Jordan.

Aidan Higgins is a writer of enormous integrity, who has remained true to his vision throughout a long writing life, which spans over forty years. He has continued writing out of a vocation to write, rather than in the pursuit of fame or fortune. His work is often compared to that of James Joyce, and through Samuel Beckett, who was Joyce’s Secretary and Higgins’ early mentor, Aidan Higgins provides a direct link to a distinguished strand of Ireland’s literary heritage.

Therefore, Chancellor, for his contribution to Irish literature, I commend Aidan Higgins for the award of Doctor of Letters.

Praehonorabilis Cancellarie, Totaque Universitas, Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus, quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Litteris, idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.