PRESIDENT Michael D Higgins has led tributes to Derry author, poet and intellectual Seamus Deane who has died at the age of 81.
President Higgins said Mr Deane's death was an "incalculable loss" to Irish writing and a loss of a "distinguished poet, novelist and internally acclaimed university teacher".
A former professor of English at Notre Dame University and at University College Dublin, he also taught at Berkeley.
An intellectual powerhouse, he was best known outside the world of academia for his Booker-nominated debut novel Reading in the Dark, based on a Derry childhood.
"To Derry, he leaves an incomparable legacy of the life, the writing, the concerns, the despair and the hope that he shared with its people and to which so much work would respond. Few cities have a writer more embedded in its people, its history, its challenges, its hopes and its humour," President Higgins said.
Mr Deane was a classmate at St Columb's College of late Nobel literature laureate Seamus Heaney. With Heaney, playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea he was among the founding members of Field Day Theatre Company.
He was part of the `1947 Education Act generation', which included John Hume, Eamonn McCann and the late Seamus Mallon.
Before entering the world of literature and academia, he taught briefly in Derry where the young Martin McGuinness was among his pupils.
Mr McCann recalled his days at St Columb’s.
"Seamus Deane was the best soccer player in St Columb's. Then he fell in with the wrong crowd and became a poet," he said.
As a critic, he published several works covering a range of literary movements. His last book, Small World: Ireland, 1798-2018 will be published posthumously later this month.
Arts Council chairman Professor Kevin Rafter described Mr Deane as a "profound intellect" and a master of every writing form.
"Deane brought concentrated rigour and empathy to his work. An inspiring teacher and continual advocate for Irish writing, Seamus Deane leaves behind a powerful literary and cultural legacy,” Professor Rafter said.
