Eugene McCabe

Eugene McCabe (7 July 1930 – 27 August 2020) was a Scottish-born Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and television screenwriter. John Banville said McCabe was "in the first rank of contemporary Irish novelists'.

Biography Born to Irish emigrants in Glasgow, Scotland, he moved with his family to Ireland in the early 1940s. He lived on a farm near Lackey Bridge, just outside Clones in County Monaghan. He was educated at Castleknock College.

His play King of the Castle caused a minor scandal when first staged in 1964, and was protested by the League of Decency. and a "classic of our times" by Kirkus Reviews.

He defended fellow novelist Dermot Healy, who had been negatively reviewed by Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times in 2011, using the Joycean invective "shite and onions", provoking controversy in the Irish literary community.

Fintan O'Toole noted how living in Monaghan, just across the border from Fermanagh, informed McCabe's writing, and described him as "the great laureate of...indeterminacy, charting its inevitably tragic outcomes while holding somehow to the notion that it might someday become a blessing."

Eugene McCabe died on 27 August 2020, aged 90.

List of works Plays A Matter of Conscience (1962) King of the Castle (1964) Pull Down a Horseman (1966) Breakdown (1966) Swift (1969) Gale Day (1979) Victims (1981)

Television plays Cancer (1973) Heritage (1973) Siege (1973) Roma (1979)

Novel Death and Nightingales (1992)

Novella The love of sisters (2009)

Short story collections Victims: A Tale from Fermanagh (1976) Heritage and Other Stories (1978) Christ in the Fields, A Fermanagh Trilogy (1993) Tales from the Poor House (1999) Heaven Lies about Us (2005)

Children's books Cyril: The Quest of an Orphaned Squirrel (1987) Cyril's Woodland Quest (2001)

Non-fiction Shadows from the Pale: Portrait of an Irish Town (1996)