Sir Vincent O’Sullivan : 1937 – 2024
From Kirsty Gunn in the U.K.:
The world turns, and since news of the death of Vincent O’Sullivan reached us here in the Northern Hemisphere, tributes and messages of love and memory and respect pour in from across the International Community of Mansfield scholars and writers.
From America, France, Germany, Eastern Europe and Italy and the UK, all those who knew Vincent or his work, the poems, the stories, the novels, the essays and reviews and scholarship …
From Scotland, the academics and writers Graeme and Angela Smith, arts magazine editor, Gail Low and members of the Dundee literary community and beyond … From those writing in from in St Andrews and Glasgow and Edinburgh where his work was known and read and admired …
And from Manchester, London, and from Oxford and Warwick and Manchester, from Michael Schmidt, the translator, from the professors, Peter McDonald and Elleke Boehmer and Peter Davidson, Richard McCabe, and Lyndall Gordon, Helen Small, and still more colleagues and friends across the Colleges of the dreaming spires…
From writer and Guardian journalist Catherine Taylor, translator and poet Michael Hulse of The Warwick Review; from BBC Broadcaster and cultural critic Laurence Scott and members of the Royal Literary Society and Royal Literary Fund, and from Mexico and Greece and France and the US, where fiction writers and publishers and teachers read Vincent’s work and celebrate it …
The list goes on and the emails keep coming: ‘a legend’, ‘the massive sense of loss’, ‘bottomless’, ‘bereft’, ‘so, so very sad’ and ‘how we will miss him’ …
As New Zealand goes to sleep the other side of the world wakes up to fresh mourning. ‘Vincent’s voice is in my head,’ writes Michael Hulse. He belonged here too.
Read Kirsty’s portrait of Vincent O’Sullivan here.
Read Majella Cullinane’s interview with him here.
'The thirty-five of us were in the country of dream-merchants, and strange things were bound to happen.' - Anne Kennedy