Dermot Healy, 'uncompromisingly brilliant' Irish poet and novelist, dies at 66

The Irish author Dermot Healy, whose poetry and novels drew him fans from Seamus Heaney to Roddy Doyle, has died aged 66, The Guardian reported.

The news was reported by Irish press, and confirmed to the Guardian by his editor and fellow poet Peter Fallon, who had known Healy since the early 1970s. "It's a shock – he's too young, and quite honestly we have had more than enough of that recently," said Fallon. The Gallery Press founder described Healy as "a true original", saying that whether he was writing poetry, novels, plays, or non-fiction, "what could not be escaped was his distinctive way of seeing and of saying, that was utterly trustworthy, because it was utterly his own".

Healy was the author of four collections of poetry, most recently A Fool's Errand, a book-length poem about the migration of barnacle geese from Greenland to an island by his home in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, which took him 12 years to write.

His memoir, The Bend for Home, was described by the author Patrick McCabe as "probably the finest memoir … written in Ireland in the last 50 years", while Seamus Heaney called Healy "the heir of Patrick Kavanagh". Roddy Doyle has described him as "Ireland's finest living novelist", while Anne Enright called A Goat's Song "one of the big Irish novels … a wrangle, an existential tussle, one of those books that makes its own language". Healy's most recent novel, Long Time, No See, was set in an isolated coastal town in the north-west of Ireland. Annie Proulx, reviewing it in the Guardian, called it "a grand read, funny and provocative, but it can also be understood as a guide to the manners and deportment necessary to live successfully in a small village of inbred and feuding residents".