Paul Auster, the prolific US novelist whose works included The New York Trilogy, has died of complications from lung cancer, a friend of the novelist said.
He was 77.
Auster died on Tuesday evening at his home in Brooklyn, New York, surrounded by family, including his wife, Siri Hustvedt, and daughter Sophie Auster, his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden said in a statement.
Photo: 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 last year that he had been diagnosed with cancer.
Auster’s 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.
Lyden called Auster a “writer’s writer” who covered “every facet of loss, loneliness, and the joys and sorrows of a life in words.”
Auster grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Jewish-Polish immigrants.
He moved to New York to attend Columbia University and later spent four years in France.
His big breakthrough came with The New York Trilogy, a philosophical twist on the detective genre featuring a shady quartet of private investigators named Blue, Brown, Black and White.
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