The Irish author Dermot Healy, whose poetry and novels drew him fans from Seamus Heaney to Roddy Doyle, has died aged 66.

The news was reported by Irish press, and confirmed to the Guardian by his editor and fellow poet Peter Fallon, who had known Healy since the early 1970s. "It's a shock – he's too young, and quite honestly we have had more than enough of that recently," said Fallon. The Gallery Press founder described Healy as "a true original", saying that whether he was writing poetry, novels, plays, or non-fiction, "what could not be escaped was his distinctive way of seeing and of saying, that was utterly trustworthy, because it was utterly his own".

Healy was the author of four collections of poetry, most recently A Fool's Errand, a book-length poem about the migration of barnacle geese from Greenland to an island by his home in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, which took him 12 years to write.

His memoir, The Bend for Home, was described by the author Patrick McCabe as "probably the finest memoir … written in Ireland in the last 50 years", while Seamus Heaney called Healy "the heir of Patrick Kavanagh". Roddy Doyle has described him as "Ireland's finest living novelist", while Anne Enright called A Goat's Song "one of the big Irish novels … a wrangle, an existential tussle, one of those books that makes its own language". Healy's most recent novel, Long Time, No See, was set in an isolated coastal town in the north-west of Ireland. Annie Proulx, reviewing it in the Guardian, called it "a grand read, funny and provocative, but it can also be understood as a guide to the manners and deportment necessary to live successfully in a small village of inbred and feuding residents".

Healy's agent Clare Conville called the author "a great man of Irish letters", and "an uncompromisingly brilliant writer in the tradition of Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien whose novels and one memoir The Bend for Home reflect the Irish experience in a unique way".

"Dermot was enormously good company too and never more so than when he shared the beauty and the bars of his beloved Sligo with visitors. I feel very honoured to have known him and know that life will feel sadder without him," said Conville.

His editor Lee Brackstone, at Faber & Faber, said: "In the 10 years I worked with Dermot, he only produced one work of fiction for Faber, Long Time, No See. But what a book. I remember thinking at the time how fortunate I was to be in touching distance of this work of art and this writer who was surely a great genius of late Irish modernism."

Faber has recently acquired rights to Healy's previous novels, and is bringing forward their planned reissue to next week, said Brackstone.

Sean O'Hagan, in a 2011 Observer profile of Healy wrote of Long Time, No See that he had "never read anything like it before"; the author told the Observer that "I was trying to stay out of it and let the reader take over and run with it". "I left out all motives in the book", so "even when a character, say, bends down to put flowers by a spot on the roadside, you have the suggestion of what happened rather than it being spelt out."

Winner of literary prizes including the Hennessy, the Tom Gallon and the Encore, Healy also wrote and directed plays, including The Long Swim and On Broken Wings.

"I think of him as someone who lived on the edge, in some way," said Fallon. "He lived on the very edge of County Sligo, the edge of Ireland – the edge of Europe, you might say. In some ways he lived on the edge of the literary community, but in certain ways he was central to the community he shaped around himself, especially in the north-west of Ireland. And it was the rough edge of his work, which in some ways was so distinctive, which attracted his readers."