Balcony of Europe

Aidan Higgins, born in Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland in 1927, wrote short stories, novels, travel pieces, radio plays, and a large body of criticism. A consummate stylist, his writing is lush and complex. His books include Scenes from a Receding Past, Bornholm Night-Ferry, Balcony of Europe, and Langrishe, Go Down, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1966 and was later adapted for television by Harold Pinter.

Neil Murphy teaches contemporary literature at NTU, Singapore. He is the author of Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt (2004) and editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (2010) and of the revised edition of Higgins’s Balcony of Europe (2010). He co-edited (with Keith Hopper) a special Flann O’Brien centenary issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (2011) and The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on contemporary fiction, Irish writing, and theories of reading, and is currently completing a book on John Banville.