Once lauded ‘the best writer in Ireland’, Johnston began publishing in her 40s and was Booker-shortlisted for her 1977 novel set during the Troubles, Shadows on Our Skin. Jennifer Johnston, the Booker-shortlisted novelist and playwright who explored family, loss and memory against the backdrop of a changing Ireland, has died aged 95.
Lauded as “the best writer in Ireland” by novelist Roddy Doyle, Johnston published regularly across the four-decade span of her career, which began when she was in her 40s. Though she collected many prizes, including a lifetime achievement award at the Irish book awards in 2012, she was often considered an underappreciated writer.
Johnston was born into a Protestant family in Dublin on 12 January 1930. Her mother was the actor Shelah Richards and her father was the playwright and war correspondent Denis Johnston, who is regarded as the subject of Johnston’s 2009 novel Truth or Fiction, about an ageing playwright who feels forgotten.
“Johnston can pack much into a brief space; her hallmark, as a writer, is stylish economy,” wrote Penelope Lively in a Guardian review of the novel. “That gift is plentifully evident in this book: succinct dialogue, neat establishment of the main characters.”.
Johnston began studying French and English at Trinity College in the late 1940s, but left without finishing her degree and married a fellow student, Ian Smyth. The couple had four children together. Johnston developed an urge to write after having children; it was the only way “she could see of escaping the trap of domesticity and its isolation”, her son Patrick Smyth, a journalist, told the Irish Times.
Her first novel, The Captains and the Kings, was published in 1972, and won the Evening Standard best first novel award. Her third and perhaps best known book, How Many Miles to Babylon?, was published in 1974. It follows the relationship between an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and a working-class boy who later find themselves fighting together in the first world war.
“In its oblique speech, knotty lyricism and careful description, Johnston’s novel conveys both the insanity of war and the poignancy of unspoken tenderness,” wrote Philip Womack in an Observer review of the novel. In the 70s, Johnston moved to Derry with her second husband, David Gilliland, but returned to Dublin after his death in 2019.
In 1977 she was shortlisted for the Booker prize for her novel Shadows on Our Skin, which is set during the Troubles. In 1979 she won the Whitbread prize – which later became the Costa book awards – for The Old Jest. Her first play, The Nightingale and Not the Lark, was performed in 1981.
Her later novels include The Invisible Worm, The Gingerbread Woman, Grace and Truth and her final novel, Naming the Stars. Of her 2007 novel Foolish Mortals, Freya McClelland wrote in the Observer that Johnston “shows once again how well she understands human nature, its paradoxes, strengths, cruelties and frailties”.
While “the bigger picture – war, culture clash, the Northern Irish troubles – might not take centre stage” in her novels, “it is always there in the background, perhaps a more realistic portrayal of the way history subtly intrudes on most people’s lives,” wrote Rosie Cowan in the Guardian in 2004.
