Leitrim was today preparing for the funeral of John McGahern tomorrow in his home parish of Aughawillian.
It is expected to be one of the biggest funerals ever seen in the county.
The writer's remains will be taken from the Mater Hospital in Dublin at 8am. The funeral cortege will travel via Longford, Mohill and Ballinamore to Aughawillian for a funeral mass in St Patrick's Church at 12 noon.
Tributes to the writer - who enjoyed enormous critical praise for the beauty of his prose - continue to be made.
Former Fine Gael leader John Bruton said: "John McGahern was not only a great novelist and short story writer but, in many respects, he was a social historian of 20th-century Ireland.
"In fact, when it came to describing emotion, nobody comes close to him in capturing the subtle transitions that took his characters and readers from elation to despair and back," Mr Bruton said.
Labour Party president Michael D Higgins said: "John was a formidable talent, arguably Ireland's finest writer, and a man of strong convictions and beliefs, qualities which brought him into conflict with authority when he was a young teacher in the 1960s."