Grailquest author Herbie Brennan dies aged 83 after long Parkinson’s battle
Herbie Brennan, who died on New Year's Day aged 83.
Irish author Herbie Brennan has died after a long battle with Parkinson’s. He was 83.
Brennan passed away peacefully on New Year’s Day.
Brennan grew up in Gilford, a small village between Banbridge and Portadown, Co Down, and lived in Tullow, Co Carlow in recent years. He was one of Ireland’s foremost imaginative writers.
Writing as ‘JH Brennan’, he published over 100 titles, including the popular Grailquest and Faerie Wars Chronicles and sold 10 million books across 50 countries. He came to adventure books after discovering Dungeons and Dragons.
He joined the Belfast Telegraph as a reporter at 18 before moving to Dublin in the 1960s to edit weekly news magazine Scene.
In recent years, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease but continued to write and publish, telling the Irish Examiner in a 2020 interview: “I can remember one good day when I wrote 10,000 words. Now I’m very lucky if I can write more than 500. It drives me mad. I’m very slow writing now.
“When I was first diagnosed, I was finding it more and more difficult to write altogether. In the early stages before I got the dosage of medicines right, I wrote a book about cats [The Mysterious World of Cats]. It was the hardest thing I ever did.”
