Dermot Healy

Westmeath-born, long resident on the Sligo coast at Ballyconnell. Novelist, playwright, memoirist and poet; A Fool's Errand (2010), on barnacle geese, is a superb book-length poem. Seamus Heaney called him the heir to Patrick Kavanagh. The Dermot Healy International Poetry Prize is named for him — see festivals.