In Memoriam

I fear I may have missed others, but I am sadly opening this thread with the sad news of the death on 12 January 2012 of Reginald Hill, aged 75, with a brain tumour:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/13/reginald-hill

His most famous series features Dalziell and Pascoe, and has been adapted for TV. There is also the Joe Sixsmith series about a black PI living in Luton.

I'm sorry to hear about Reginald Hill. I've always meant to read him and, in fact, purchased A Clubbable Woman late last year.

Thanks for starting this thread. I've added it to the wiki.

I hadn't heard of Reginald Hill. I'll have to check into his books.

Just saw on Janet Rudolph's Mystery Readers blog that mystery author Margaret Lawrence has passed away. She also wrote under the name M.K. Lorens.

Her real name was Lorraine "Margaret" Keilstrup.

I loved her historical mystery series featuring midwife Hannah Trevor. The first was Hearts and Bones.

Under the M.K. Lorens name, the first in the series was Sweet Narcissus.

Her obituary is at: http://www.voy.com/221392/87582.html

Interestingly, her flower garden included her grandmother's roses and poppies first planted from seeds brought from Flanders Field after World War I.

I'm sad to hear this - I also loved the three Hannah Trevor books, and still have the one about Hannah's daughter to read. I have three of the M K Lorens books but haven't read those yet.

Dorothy Gilman, the author of the Mrs. Pollifax mysteries, has passed away at the age of 88.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/books/dorothy-gilman-spy-novelist-dies-at-88.h...

British science fiction author Samuel Youd, who wrote the prescient story of environmental disaster The Death of Grass under one of his pseudonyms, John Christopher, has died.
Samuel Youd – aka John Christopher– dies aged 89

I've read a few of his books but not nearly as many as I should have by now.

Jeffrey Zaslow, bestselling author of The Last Lecture, The Girls from Ames, Highest Duty with the Miracle on the Hudson pilot, as well as the new book on Gabby Giffords, lost control of his car on a snowy Michigan road and was hit by a semi and died.

He was only 53.

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/local/author-jeff-zaslow-dies-at-age-53#.Tz...

Italian author Antonio Tabucchi died in Lisbon today, after a long battle with cancer. Several of us read and loved his most famous novel, Pereira Declares, and I own two of his other books, The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro and Little Misunderstandings of No Importance. I'll read one or both books next month.

Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi dies

Oh, sad news, just as he was becoming better known, at least in the English speaking world. For some reason, I'd thought he was a bit younger (than 68) but it's still too young (my mum is due to be that age in June)

More sad news: I just received a tweet from @nationalbook that the National Book Award winning poet Adrienne Rich has died at the age of 82. I have her most recent poetry collection Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, which was a finalist for last year's National Book Award. I'll plan to read it this weekend.

Poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died

Poetry Foundation page: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/adrienne-rich

I have On Lies, Secrets and Silence by her but don't think I've read it (it's possible I did more than 20 years ago...) How odd that her obituary said nothing about sexuality as I understand that's something she wrote about.

>12 elkiedee: That was a quick blog post from the Los Angeles Times, which seems to be the first news outlet to have reported her death, within the past hour. The blog mentions that a full obituary will be forthcoming, and I would assume that the Guardian and the New York Times will also publish obituaries soon.

Here's Rich's obituary from the Washington Post

and from The New York Times

I just found out that Harry Crews also died on the 28th. I read one of his novels in January and hope to read more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/books/harry-crews-writer-of-dark-fiction-is-de...

Maurice Sendak, author of lots of children's books, most famously Where the Wild Things Are, has died at 83.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/books/maurice-sendak-childrens-author-dies-at-...

I also just learned that Angelica Garnett --writer and artist-- died on Friday at the age of 93. She is the daughter of Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant, and niece of Virginia Woolf, portrayed here in the film The Hours:



I've recently acquired some of her books, so I might just have to read them sooner rather than later.

I read her autobiographical stories and her memoir. Thanks for posting that.

Thanks for posting; I have always wanted to read her memoir.

Ray Bradbury was one of my area's most famous native sons. He's originally from Waukegan, IL and there are still Ray Bradbury storytelling festivals and the like, here.

An article on Bradbury, from our local perspective, is at:

http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20120606/entlife/706069868/

I just received an e-mail from the NYT about the death of Barry Unsworth, whose novel Sacred Hunger won the Booker Prize in 1992:

Barry Unsworth, Writer of Historical Fiction, Dies at 81

Oh no. I was sad about Bradbury, didn't know about A. Garnett, but I'm Very affected by the death of Unsworth. Sacred Hunger is such a fine, fine book.

Darryl - thanks for putting that up about Unsworth - two of my favourite books of the 90's were his - Sacred Hunger of course and Morality Play which made my list of the books of the 90's (If I hadn't restricted myself to one book per author they both may have been there). His The Songs of the Kings fictionalised the Trojan war and ancient Greece presaging by 8 years The Song of Achilles by Ms. Miller which I am now reading. I think I will read Unsworth's next as I can compare the two.

RIP Nora Ephron

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18609262

The Encyclopedia Brown books were one of the first book series I truly loved, as a child. Sad to see the passing of the author, Donald Sobol.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/books/donald-j-sobol-creator-of-encyclopedia-b...

I was saddened to read about the death of William Raspberry, the long time columnist for The Washingto Post and author of Looking Backward at Us, earlier this week. His weekly column, which appeared in numerous newspapers other than the Post, was a powerful voice of reason and moderation during the civil rights movement, occasionally angering those on the left and the right, but I often found myself completely in agreement with his opinions. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1994.

NYT: William Raspberry, Prizewinning Columnist, Dies at 76

Washington Post: William Raspberry dies at 76: Washington Post columnist wrote about social issues including race, poverty

Raspberry was from a Mississippi town that was about 15 or 20 minutes from where I grew up. I grew up reading his columns. I was also sad to learn about his death. He was a gifted writer.

RIP Maeve Binchy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/31/maeve-binchy-irish-writer-dies?newsf...

I mentioned on my thread last week but never posted here:

Margaret Mahy 1936 - 2012 from cancer
http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/editorial/margaret-mahy-a-lion-in-her-field...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/26/margaret-mahy

#29, Sad news about Maeve Binchy - I read a lot of her books at one stage.

Thank you for that, I've probably only read a couple of Mahy's books but kept meaning to read more.

I've only just seen this, looking someone else up!

Rosa Guy wrote books for adults (one was a VMC) and children/young adults - I have several of the latter, and reading this made me want to reread her books,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/17/rosa-guy

Gore Vidal has died. One of a kind, for sure.

Marvin Hamlisch died on the 7th. I've loved so many of his songs.

Oh, I'm sad to hear that. I liked much of his music, too.

I believe it was Cynara who mentioned on her thread that David Rakoff died of cancer recently. He was only 47. He had written 3 books of essays.

I was shocked and saddened to hear of David Rakoff's death when I heard it yesterday. I didn't know he'd been ill. He was so young! Nora Ephron, and now him--now who is going to make us laugh with their witty observations about everyday life?

Aussie shit-stirrer and art critic with the Times, Robert Hughes, died in New York last week. Writer of several books, including Shock of the New and American Visions and the excellent The Fatal Shore he was witty and erudite and a bit of a rabble-rouser. I admired him enormously.

Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and Cosmopolitan editor, dies age 90

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19250147

oh, my, she did stir the pot when she was in the news business, and the magazine business!

Well there you go! I thought she died years ago!

Well there you go! I thought she died years ago!

That was my first reaction.

lol

Harry Harrison died today. He was author of many science fiction books, including Make Room! Make Room! which was the basis of the movie Soylent Green.

A local author, perhaps not widely known, but a champion of poetry, for which I have admired her, Karen Blomain died this week.

Phyllis Diller has died, at age 95 Another one of those icons I would have said had passed away a few years ago already!

I saw an interview with her not too long ago, though I can't be sure when it was made. She always kept her riotous sense of humor.

Nina Bawden, a Virago author, passed away today at age 87. Two of her novels made the Booker short list. Her obituary appeared in the Guardian.

Oh, I'm sad to hear that. I haven't read that many of her grown up novels but Nina Bawden's children's books were a staple of my childhood reading.

#49. And I've never read any of her children's books.

Neil Armstrong died today.

In looking for the right covers of some of my Nina Bawden children's books, that is from memory since I can't reach that shelf!, I discovered that the author of one of my favourite books as a child died last year. The book was Ransom for a Knight , a historical novel about a young girl who travels from the south of England (maybe Sussex, but it's far south) to Scotland to rescue her father who is a hostage following the 14th century Battle of Bannockburn. Picard also wrote other historical novels and published collections of fairytales and retellings of myths.

Noel Polk, a Faulkner scholar, editor and a champion of Southern literature died last week. Most recently he collaborated with Stephen M. Ross on a Folio Society edition of The Sound and the Fury which incorporated Faulkner's idea of printing the "Benji" section in various colored inks, as an aid to understanding the chronology of its multiple perspectives.

Feminist writer Eva Figes died aged 80:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/07/eva-figes

Historian Eric Hobsbawm died today aged 95

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/historian-eric-hobsbawm-dies-aged-95-daughter-103345956...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm-an-appreciation?CMP=t...

I've just learned that Helen Nicoll has died aged 74:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/09/helen-nicoll

She was the author of the lovely Meg and Mog series of books featuring a rather incompetent witch, and the Guardian obituary is by the illustrator of those books, Jan Pienkowski.

She also worked on children's programmes on the BBC (this was where she first worked with Pienkowski), and in the 1980s, founded the audiobook Cover to Cover which produced unabridged versions of classics and children's books, including the UK Harry Potter recordings with Stephen Fry as reader (headhunted for the role by Nicolls).

Someone else just died today at the age of 74, but I can't remember who he was. 74 used to seem so old, but the closer I get, the younger it seems.

Oh, sad. Charlie and I *love* Meg & Mog.

Han Suyin died last week:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/04/han-suyin

I missed this obituary at the time

Shulamith Firestone, author of 1970s feminist text The Dialectic of Sex, was found dead in her Manhattan apartment in August, aged 67.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/06/shulamith-firestone

I am ashamed to say I do not know of this Mississippi-born author, who was a student at Ole Miss while Faulkner was still alive and writing in Oxford. Ellen Douglas (Josephine Ayres Haxton) , died on November 7, 2012. I must investigate her work.

The poet Jack Gilbert died in Berkeley, California on Tuesday at the age of 87. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, he was best known for his poetry about his home town of Pittsburgh, and the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, where he lived in the 1960s. He won several literary awards, most notably the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2005 for Refusing Heaven. Earlier this year Knopf published Collected Poems, which received a glowing review earlier this year in the New York Times.

Jack Gilbert, a Poet Whose Words Transformed Lives, Is Dead at 87

Australia is mourning the death of one of its most famous citizens, internationally famous author Bryce Courtenay who succumbed to stomach cancer late on Thursday, aged 79 years.

Courtenay showed the power of one storyteller

I've only read his The Power of One but he wrote about 20 novels from the age of 55 yrs.

I happened to stumble upon the news that the Japanese author Saiichi Maruya died on October 13th at the age of 87. He originally received acclaim for his translations of the works of James Joyce into Japanese, particularly Ulysses and The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. He later became a professor of English and a widely respected literary critic before he began to write novels. He won several literary awards, most notably the Akutagawa Prize for Toshi No nokori (The Rest of the Year) and the Tanizaki Prize for Singular Rebellion. At least four of his books have been translated into English, including Singular Rebellion and Grass for My Pillow, a novel about a conscientious objector during World War II, which is one of my favorite Japanese novels. I own Singular Rebellion and A Mature Woman, and I'll plan to read them soon.

Kyodo News: Prize-winning writer Saiichi Maruya dies at 87

Can you imagine the effort it took to translate Ulysses into Japanese?

I, too, was amazed to think of someone translating such a large and complex novel. Awesome.

I feel humbled as I haven't even attempted to read it in my mother tongue.

She died 4 months ago but as the only obituary I've found was in the Scotsman, and I don't normally read that, I've only just learned (originally from Wikipedia), writer Mollie Hunter, who wrote lots of historical novels for children, and two semi autobiographical ones about a girl growing up, died on 31 July aged 90.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-mollie-hunter-mcilwraith-writer...

David Oliver Relin, one of the co-authors of Three Cups of Tea died on Nov 15. According to a statement from his family, he took his own life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/business/media/david-oliver-relin-co-author-of...

Omigosh. So Greg Mortenson lied and David Oliver Relin killed himself? That's just horrible.

OtherJoyce, you're too funny!

I heard a piece on public radio last night about Relin and I think the world has lost a fine soul, and a writer with good intentions.

RIP Jayne Cortez (1936-2012), the African-American jazz poet, author, community activist, and founder of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa. She authored 10 books of poetry, and won several awards, including the American Book Award in 1980 and the Langston Hughes Award for excellence in the arts and letters. She married the legendary jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman at the age of 18, and became famous in her own right, as she created her own jazz band, Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters, in which she read her poems backed by her musicians. I saw her perform in San Francisco in 2007 with her son Denardo Coleman, an established drummer and producer, one night after he played with his father during that year's San Francisco Jazz Festival.

San Francisco Chronicle article: Poet Jayne Cortez makes heady music with Ornette Coleman sidemen (2007 article which describes the two concerts I attended)

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayne_Cortez

Horror writer James Herbert has died aged 69 -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/9...

I've never read him and don't plan to start, but Mike likes his books.

Chinua Achebe, acclaimed Nigerian writer and one of the most important writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, died this morning.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/22/novelist-chinua-achebe-dies

Without Siskel and Ebert, I don't know how I'm going to decide what films to see. Sad news.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has died. the only person to have won the Booker prize and an Oscar. Which takes some doing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/99...

(apologies for the long link). I find it interesting that this has been located under film obits, not books.

#6 I know, Joyce. But David Edelstein in pretty good, and Kenneth Turan can be almost as ruthless as Early Ebert.

#77 - That's sad too--Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala made some of my very favourite films, and certainly among the most beautiful.

So sad about Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - she was a really fine novelist and story writer. I have read several of her books and recommend them.

The 2013 thread is here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/146465

One of my favourite singer-songwriters, Lou Reed, has died aged 71

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/27/us-usa-loureed-idUSBRE99Q09620131027