IT’S HARD TO believe it now, but John McGahern, the great Irish novelist of his generation, will have passed twenty years ago on Monday week, 30 March.

Growing up just down the road from John’s native Leitrim in county Longford, we were always proud to have been in the universe of John’s understanding and the universe of his view. I never got to meet John (there were a few small opportunities, including a school visit), but we never crossed paths. My father, on the other hand, often met John in the livestock marts of County Leitrim. And I, in my turn, when I was of age, met men and women in marts, including auctioneers, who remembered John fondly.

John’s legacy means that we are still talking about him twenty years later and next month at the Granard Booktown festival in County Longford I will be in conversation with leading writers Belinda McKeon and Claire Keegan to talk about John’s legacy in today’s world.

Marking John’s passing is something that we wanted to do at the festival because his work is still very much alive in the hearts of readers across the island and the world. One only has to think of the recent screen adaptation of That They May Face The Rising Sun by Pat Collins to know that there is still a deep, rich vein of storytelling that John brought forward from himself and which would influence others.

When I set out to become a writer a decade ago, John was the natural figure to use as a guiding light.

He lived in rural Ireland, he wrote about rural Ireland, and he farmed the land, all things I did myself.

I reasoned that if John could have done it, then maybe, just maybe, with a bit of luck, I could do it too.

I once heard in an interview with John that we lived in a largely 19th-century country until the 1970s in Ireland, and that is indeed true. Of course, the country has rapidly changed in the intervening decades and yet we still embrace the world John created in fiction.

John has featured in a number of Pat Collins documentaries, including A Private World, a documentary made about the writer’s life. It was this documentary I watched while living in Sydney, Australia, in the mid-2000s. In the powerful piece, one could see the beauty of Leitrim and the midlands, worlds I had grown up in. In ways, I think it was reading his books that gave me the final push to try and write myself in my mid-20s.

When thinking and talking about John, there are so many wonderful works to consider: The Barracks, Amongst Women, his short stories (which truly are special), his memoir and That They May Face The Rising Sun. Preparing for this panel I’m excited to dip back into John’s world.

There are images that are still aflame in my mind even decades later. Who could forget Moran in Amongst Women? But I think now I find myself drawn increasingly to That They May Face The Rising Sun. Perhaps it is age or the fact that I lived by a lake in Longford for a year (the novel is set beside a lake), but I find the everyday, the ordinary greatness of human lives drawn out in the book to be masterful.

John’s Ireland has changed; the one he grew up in is gone, but there are still people who remember it, and there are still echoes of it.

Much no doubt will be said in the press in the coming weeks as we rightly remember John’s legacy, and I hope that those who come to Granard Booktown will see his influence on this generation’s writers.

I am eternally indebted to the Irish school curriculum, which allowed me as a teenager to study Amongst Women and which influenced me greatly in my development as a writer. One never knows the influence school set books can have on young people or the development of young writers.

It’s hard to believe it is twenty years since John’s passing, but one thing I do know is that we will still be talking about John McGahern in another twenty on top of that.

His masterful, wise, powerful and poignant world will go on to capture generation after generation.

In the meantime, I’m going to revisit John’s work slowly over the weeks leading up to the book festival. It’s a body of work that deserves careful close reading, and it is a body of work that any writer would be proud to have called their own.

Maybe at the next livestock mart meeting, I’ll hear another story about John. I will look forward to that as I always do. Out of the ordinary he created greatness and that is something we all of us readers can be delighted with.

Granard Booktown Festival will be hosting The John McGahern Retrospective panel on 19 April in Granard, Co Longford, with writers Belinda McKeon, Claire Keegan and John Connell being interviewed by broadcaster and writer Ella McSweeney. Tickets can be purchased here. 

John Connell is a multi-award-winning author, film producer, journalist and farmer.