Jubilation erupted when three Irish writers made the Booker Prize longlist this year – but the smiles soon faded when Colm Tóibín, Ed O’Loughlin and the veteran William Trevor failed to progress to the shortlist, which was announced on 8 September.

There was some irony in this timing as it marked the anniversary of another Booker winner, a man not born but self-identified as Irish, who died tragically in his prime 30 years ago.

In the flurry of anniversary programmes about the murder of Earl Mountbatten and the disastrous Fastnet yacht race, scant mention was made of the other tragedy of the summer of 1979, the drowning of JG Farrell. Farrell was fishing, not sailing, at the time, but the angry waves that assaulted and overpowered him in west Cork originated from the same extraordinary weather system that took 15 lives in the Fastnet race.

Although his family were Irish, Farrell, a bachelor, had only come to live here permanently a few months before his death. His drowning was put down to his unfamiliarity with weather conditions in the region, the Sheep’s Head peninsula, and how quickly they could turn.

Farrell is one of English literature’s lost literary lions. He was 44 when he died and had written six novels, three of which share the theme of the dying of the British Empire, one of which was set in Northern Ireland.

Author Salman Rushdie believes that Farrell’s early demise deprived literature of one of its potentially greatest exponents in the 20th century. Praise indeed as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children edged out Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur as ‘the Booker of Bookers’ when a poll was taken last year to find the novel that would have beaten six distinguished Booker winners in a champion-of-champions contest.

Other Farrell fans include a diaspora of critics across the world, including this writer; Gerald Dawe, the poet and director of the Oscar Wilde centre for writing; and fiery Irish Independent columnist Kevin Myers.

The Siege of Krishnapur is a charming but substantial story of the British in India and the events surrounding a garrison that was overwhelmed by its encroaching subjects.

The book’s opening paragraphs immediately display the gentle wit and powers of description that characterise Farrell’s best work: a quarter of japatis (Indian bread cakes) are found in the dispatch box of the Krishnapur Collector of Taxes when he puts in his hand for some documents. Farrell gently leads the trail from the japatis to the gathering sense of doom around the settlement, which culminates in the bloody climax.

The book is full of dry humour. One scholar, coincidentally with the surname Booker, notes that Farrell wrote a Victorian novel that was believable, but in a language and tone that could not have been conveyed in that era, making it a classic of post-modern writing.

Whether your interest is post-modernism or escaping into a riveting story, Farrell can deliver.

It is the humour, says Farrell biographer Lavinia Greacen, that appealed to her first and foremost in his work.

“I never met him, though I found out as time went on that I knew many people who also knew Jim,” says Greacen, who is based in Ticknock, Co Dublin. “When it became known that I was working on a biography, many people contacted me. It turned out that I even shared a hairdresser with Jim’s aunt.”

Greacen believes the secret of the greatness of Farrell’s fiction is its intelligence. “Critics like a good story in intellectual pyjamas and that is what these books are. They were ahead of their time and you can read and re-read them.”

Kevin Myers believes that the books in Farrell’s empire trilogy – The Siege of Krishnapur, The Singapore Grip and Troubles – will endure as classics.

He says: “William Trevor aside, JG Farrell was perhaps the last Irish novelist who saw his duty primarily as a storyteller, whose authorial pen was simply a slave to the narrative. The result was a handful of the choicest novels written in English in the past 50 years, each one a minor masterpiece.

“People will be reading them and wondering why no-one writes such great novels any more,” Myers adds. “The answer is that the skill is dead.”

To mark the 30th anniversary of his death, next month Cork University Press is publishing a new collection of Farrell’s letters, edited by Lavinia Greacen. Farrell’s books are freely available but a particularly attractive set was chosen for reprint by the New York Review of Books Classics imprint, which specialises in publishing literary treasures that might otherwise disappear from the bookshelves.