Novelist and playwright Eugene McCabe has died

Throughout his career Mr McCabe received many awards for his work.

Acclaimed author and playwright Eugene McCabe has died.

One of Ireland’s leading contemporary writers, he passed away age 90.

Born in Glasgow in 1930 to a Fermanagh mother and a Cavan father, in 1939 Mr McCabe's grandfather bought a farm near Lackey Bridge in Clones, Co Monaghan, to which the writer moved to has lived there since 1954.

He attended University College Cork, and having cut his teeth writing for theatre, Mr McCabe also began scripting for television when RTÉ began in 1960.

In 1964 his play King of the Castle was the success of that year's Dublin Theatre Festival.

In the early seventies he wrote a trilogy of television plays on the differing traditions in Northern Ireland. The trilogy, broadcast by RTÉ Television in 1973 was titled 'Victims' and consisted of 'Cancer', 'Heritage' and 'Siege'. He wrote the trilogy in as a statement in response to the Troubles, and was an ardent critic of violent extremism and sectarianism.

In 1992 he published his novel 'Death and Nightingales'. The novel was described by fellow Irish writer Colm Tóibín as “one of the great Irish masterpieces of the century” and a “classic of our times” by Kirkus Reviews.

Throughout his career Mr McCabe received many awards for his work.

They included the Irish Life Theatre Award in 1964 for 'King of the Castle'; the Legum Doctorate from University of Prince Edward Island, Canada 1990; and the Butler Literary Award for Prose from Irish American Cultural Institute in 2002.

From the American/Irish Ireland Funds, he also received the 2006 AWB Vincent Literary Award. Mr McCabe was also a member of Aosdána, an association of artists whose work is deemed to have made an outstanding contribution to the creative arts.