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Tribute to JG Farrell:The early death of novelist JG Farrell, who drowned aged 44 at Kilcrohane in Co Cork 30 years ago this year, was nothing less than a disaster for literature, said John Banville, launching a selection of the late writer’s letters and diaries this week. Banville, who wrote a foreword to JG Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries, edited by Lavinia Greacen and published by Cork University Press (CUP), added that Farrell’s loss is still keenly felt by those with any serious interest in good fiction.

Like all artists, says Banville in his foreword, Farrell was aware of the personal cost of art, of the deprivations and interdictions it imposes on the emotional self. In the pages of the new book (reviewed in WeekendReviewlast Saturday) “there speaks to us one who in his life was passionate, sceptical, wry, funny and, above all, wholly committed to the task of being an artist”.