Pat Sheeran was an unusual academic and an unusual writer. It is rare for the personal background and experiences of an academic to be visible in his or her scholarship, yet everything about Pat Sheeran's academic work derives immediately and in a clearly recognisable way from the sense of people, of time and of place that he acquired in childhood and from his life in Galway and the West of Ireland.
Furthermore, his fiction is the result of the same preoccupations and explores the same problems as his academic work. A constant theme in all his work is one of duality: the duality between scholarship and the creative imagination, between rational thought and intuition, myth and history, madness and sanity, people and landscape.
Patrick Francis Sheeran was born on October 4th 1943 in Navan. His mother, Mary Elizabeth McArdle, was from Dundalk and his father, a senior officer in the Garda, came from a farm in Roscommon.
Pat Sheeran was educated at St Patrick's Classical School, Navan and, after a brief period as a custom's officer near the Border, in Co Leitrim, he took his BA and MA degrees in University College Dublin. He worked as a journalist with RT╔ for a year and in October 1968 he took up a teaching post at University College Galway, where he also enrolled for a PhD under Prof Lorna Reynolds. It was a period of excitement: the 1969 General Election, with the emergence of Cearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta and a youthful Michael D. Higgins, the plays of John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy, Bob Quinn and Cinegael, Desmond Fennell proclaiming Iarchonacht, the new Teaching Section of the Workers' Union of Ireland in UCG, of which Pat Sheeran was a founding member; such were some of the ingredients that shaped Pat Sheeran's subsequent career. His PhD thesis was published in 1976 under the title The Novels of Liam O'Flaherty. At the time it was unique among works of literary criticism, drawing upon material in Irish as well as in English. Throughout his university career, Pat Sheeran took a leading part in the debate on the role of the university, the methods by which knowledge is discovered and shared, the interaction between lecturer and student and the object and meaning of literary studies. When UCG conferred President Reagan with an honorary PhD, Pat Sheeran stood in protest in Eyre Square, in full academic apparel, conferring honorary degrees on behalf of the university to all and sundry, on condition that they satisfied him they could spell their name.
Pat Sheeran's philosophical fascination with duality found its fullest expression in his collaboration with Nina Witoszek. From 1984 on, almost everything he wrote was jointly written with her. Together, they produced novels, essays and short stories, as well as a scholarly book, Talking to the Dead (1998) and several film scripts. Fables of The Irish Intelligentsia, published under their shared pseudonym Nina Fitzpatrick, won The Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Fiction Prize for Literature in 1991. The prize was withdrawn on the grounds that she could not prove her entitlement to Irish citizenship, a requirement under the conditions of the prize. The book was withdrawn by the publishers.
In 1994 came their second novel, The Loves of Faustyna. Both books were highly acclaimed by the New York Times. A third novel, Daimons, will appear in 2002. Shortly before his death, Pat Sheeran had also completed a book on John Ford's film version of Liam O'Flaherty's novel The Informer.
Pat Sheeran had a passion for cinema. He and Nina Witoszek together wrote the script for two feature films: The Fifth Province, and The Turbulent Zone. They also wrote the script for the documentary Talking to the Dead.
Pat Sheeran was director of The International Yeats Summer School from 1996 to 1998. He was a Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge.
He is survived by his sons David and Marcos, their mother, Angelines, his sisters Therese, Phil and Pauline, his brother Michael, and his companion Nina.
Patrick Sheeran: born 1943; died, September 2001