Basil Payne was 48 by the time he gave up his day job as a health insurance administrator to become a full-time writer in 1971. By then he was established as a poet, with two international prizes and a burgeoning lecturing career in the United States.
In a career that encapsulated several careers, he had been a theatre reviewer in his native Dublin and a leader writer for The Irish Times during the 1960s, expanding his journalism to include film reviewing for the state broadcaster RTE in the following decade.
An entry in the Dictionary of Irish Literature dismissing Payne’s poetry as “not unpleasant entertainment” in 1979 was said to have contributed to the loss of teaching appointments in the US and funding from the Irish Arts Council. Although outraged by what his son Norbert described as an “apparently malicious literary hatchet job”, Payne was unable to afford legal action for defamation of character.
He continued to write, publishing four volumes of poems and contributing to more than a dozen anthologies. He wrote a number of plays and dramatic poems for Irish radio, graduating to the stage with Dublin’s Quare City (1973) and My Dublin, My America (1975), both at the Peacock Theatre, and Tale of Five Cities for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1980.
In later life, he developed a liking for performing his own material, presenting Be Free With Me at the Abbey Theatre in 1984, and Songs of Love at the National Concert Hall in 1989.
Born in Dublin on June 23, 1923, he died in the city, aged 88, on January 6. He is survived by his six sons and a daughter.
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