The John McGahern Companion

This collection of essays by established McGahern scholars and others interested in his work was put together to assess the writer’s current status some 20 years after his death in 2006. The Companion covers various aspects of McGahern’s oeuvre: the reception of his books among readers and literary critics; his epistolary exchanges with publishers, friends and family, and the adaptations that have been done of a certain number of his works, most recently the film version of his novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2023). It seeks to explain the reasons why, during his career, McGahern became, in the words of Professor Declan Kiberd, ‘the greatest Irish prose writer in English of the latter half of the twentieth century’. The volume draws on the McGahern Archive at University of Galway, including previously unpublished images and material, enabling readers and scholars to engage with the processes and writing of McGahern in new ways.

‘The words of McGahern were etched onto every page, so we read them as a blind person reads braille. He was a stylist but one whose lines carried the imprint of lived, felt experience. The essays collected here are a worthy tribute to his remarkably European range of thought and feeling; and the multiple backgrounds of the essayists testify to an art in which every word speaks with powerful reticence to the world. Companionable yet also solitary, the writers unerringly and in astonishingly varied ways capture the lonely crowd which moves through his stories’.

Declan Kiberd, Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English, Notre Dame University