Obituary: Gert Jonke
I had the chance to meet Gert Jonke in Vienna a few years back. I was there with Dalkey publisher John O’Brien, looking for Austrian writers to publish in English. (One of the titles we heard about was A Fucking Masterpiece, which, according to the reading report we got, actually wasn’t, but it’s still one ...
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89
As has already been written up everywhere, Alexander Solzhenitsyn died on Sunday, supposedly after a stroke. Solzhenitsyn is most well known for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (which was part of the first ever Reading the World promotion) and the Gulag Archipelago trilogy. Russia Today has a nice overview video ...
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Obituary: Hugo Claus
Hugo Claus, one of Belgium’s most respected writers, passed away yesterday, reportedly of euthanasia. Claus produced some 200 works during his career but was best known for his classic, The Sorrow of Belgium—a scathing attack on social injustice, stifling family relationships and Roman Catholic repression in ...
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Obituary: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet passed away yesterday at the age of 85. A major force in twentieth-century French literature, here’s part of the obit in “The Guardian“: He was the most prominent of France’s “new novelists,” a group that emerged in the mid-1950s and whose experimental works tossed ...
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Obituary: Francisco Umbral
From the Guardian: The writer Francisco Umbral, who has died of pneumonia aged 72, was the angry man of Spanish letters. Born in Madrid, he was brought up in the provincial Castilian city of Valladolid. Following the tradition of several generations of aspirant writers, and most particularly his beloved Ramón María del ...
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Obituary: Edward Seidensticker
As mentioned in the Complete Review, translator from the Japanese Edward Seidensticker passed away at the age of 86. From the obit in The Asahi Shimbun: The professor emeritus at Columbia University in New York translated dozens of Japanese works, but he is perhaps best known for completing a full-length English ...
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Obituary: Qurratulain Hyder
A leading writer of Urdu fiction, Qurratulain Hyder died at the age of 80. Along with her short stories, she was the author of 12 novels. From the BBC: The theme of many of Hyder’s books was the pain caused by the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Her best known novel is the epic Aag ka dariya (River ...
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