(MENAFN- The Peninsula) AFP
New York: Paul Auster, the prolific American novelist whose works included "The New York Trilogy," has died of complications from lung cancer, a friend of the novelist told AFP. He was 77.
(FILES) US writer Paul Auster looks on in Lyon on January 16, 2018. Paul Auster, the prolific American author whose works included "The New York Trilogy," has died of complications from lung cancer, the New York Times reported April 30, 2024. (Photo by JEFF PACHOUD / AFP)
Auster died on Tuesday evening at his home in Brooklyn surrounded by family, including his wife Siri Hustvedt and daughter Sophie Auster, his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden said in a statement sent to AFP.
He made his name with noirish, existentialist novels about lonely writers, outsiders and down-and-outers that were a huge hit in Europe particularly.
The author with the soulful, sunken eyes gained cult status in the 1980s and 1990s with his "New York Trilogy" of metaphysical mysteries and his hip film "Smoke," about the lost souls who frequent a Brooklyn tobacco shop.
Hustved, also an author, announced in March 2023 that he had been diagnosed with cancer.
In a long moving post on Instagram in August 2023, she wrote about their life in "Cancerland" next to photos of them as a younger couple.
(FILES) US writer Paul Auster takes part in a press conference, 18 October 2006 in the northern Spanish city of Oviedo, where he will receive the the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters, on October 20t. Paul (Photo by RAFA RIVAS / AFP)
"The patient, and I with him, have traveled straight ahead on the road, been delayed, and turned in circles," she wrote. "We haven't reached the sign that marks the country's boundary: You are now leaving Cancerland.
The UK's Booker Prize said Wednesday in a statement on X that Auster's "work touched readers and influenced writers all over the world."
Auster's work straddles the divide between the middlebrow and the highbrow.
His more than 30 books are as likely to be found in airports as on university reading lists and have been translated into more than 40 languages.
His life was marred by tragedy in later years, with his 10-month-old granddaughter dying after ingesting heroin and his son Daniel, the child's father, dying of an overdose 10 months later. Daniel's mother was Auster's first wife, the writer Lydia Davis.
Lyden called Auster a "writer's writer" who covered "every facet of loss, loneliness, and the joys and sorrows of a life in words".
"He never lost touch with human suffering, and connectedness, and it made him the beloved writer he has become," she said.
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