JP Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man, dies aged 91

ACCLAIMED author JP Donleavy has died at the age of 91.

The renowned Irish-American author and playwright died in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, on Monday.

His sister Mary Rita Donleavy told the New York Times that the cause of death was a stroke.

He was best known for his novel The Ginger Man, published in 1955, which was censored and banned here until 1968 but was later embraced as a groundbreaking classic and sold millions of copies worldwide.

From the 1970s, he spent much of his life in Mullingar. Among the many admirers of his work was actor Johnny Depp, who had been interested in filming an adaptation of The Ginger Man.

The book – which follows the often racy misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a young American living in Dublin with his English wife and daughter and studying law at Trinity College – was placed No. 99 on a Modern Library list of the greatest English language fiction of the 20th century.

Born in New York to Irish parents, Donleavy, pictured, moved to Ireland as a young man and studied at Trinity College, an experience that inspired him to write The Ginger Man.

The author of more than a dozen books, including the The Beastly Beatitudes Of Balthazar B, A Singular Man and A Fairy Tale Of New York.

Donleavy was sometimes compared to James Joyce as a prose stylist and was admired for the wit of his writing.

Donleavy was honoured with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards in 2015.