New York Trilogy Author Paul Auster dies aged 77

Paul Auster, writer of The New York Trilogy, Leviathan and 4 3 2 1 has died from complications of lung cancer at age 77.

The author was known for his highly stylised postmodernist fiction which explored themes of coincidence, fate and loss of language.

Speaking on today's news, Hot Press editor Niall Stokes said: "I remember the marvellous shock of reading a Paul Auster novel for the first time. City of Glass was the initial instalment in The New York Trilogy, and I loved it. I felt that reading his deeply thoughtful and challenging books changed something in me.

"I especially loved The Music of Chance, which was published in 1990.

"I always felt that the notion that things were somehow destined was absurd, and that – in fact – the opposite is the case. We can work and we can plan – and that is the right thing to do. Why would we embark on writing a novel if it were otherwise?

"But, of course, things happen over which we have no control, and lives are made shaped, or ruined – and that’s the beginning and the end of it. I was naturally a devotee of chaos theory, but Paul Auster’s work demonstrated the inescapable truth that we are never complete masters of our own destiny. We need a bit of luck and good fortune to help us on the way. I owe him greatly".

Among other Irish tributes to the American author was personal friend to Auster, Colum McCann, who told RTÉ Radio 1: "He was a spectacular person".

The Dublin writer said that shortly before Auster's death, literary giants Salman Rushdie and Don DeLilo visited Auster in hospital, continuing McCann said "it just shows you the reverence in which he was held in the literary world".

"He was local and he was global at the same time. there was the tiny metaphysical stuff that he was dealing with epic questions of human nature. So [he was] one of the strongest writers of our times".

Irish author Sinéad Gleeson said in article for the Guardian that Auster "believed in and played with ideas of coincidence, doubling and doppelgangers".

British novelist Ian McEwan described Auster the same article as a "super-abundantly gifted, big-hearted novelist".

Auster was long listed for the International Dublin Literary Festival seven times, and shortlisted once in 2004 for his novel The Book of Illusions.

Among the author's many other literary accolades, was a 1989 Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère, Honorary doctor from the University of Liège and a 1990  Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He was also a member of PEN America, the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Literature and a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947, Auster was raised by his two Austrian Jewish parents. While hiking at a summer camp aged 14, Auster witnessed a boy getting struck by lightning and dying instantly, an event which the writer said absolutely changed his life.

A similar incident occurs in Auster’s 2017 Booker-shortlisted novel 4 3 2 1 when one of the book’s four versions of protagonist Archie Ferguson runs under a tree at a summer camp and is killed by a falling branch  as a result of a  lightning bolt.

Auster studied at Columbia University New York before moving to Paris in the early 1970s, where he worked a variety of jobs, including translation, and lived with his “on-again off-again” girlfriend, the writer Lydia Davis, whom he had met while at college. In 1974, they returned to the US and married. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but separated shortly afterwards.

Auster and his second wife, fellow writer Siri Hustvedt were married in 1981. Together they had one daughter, Sophie Auster, a singer.

On March 11, 2023, Auster's wife Siri Hustvedt revealed on Instagram that he had been diagnosed with cancer in December 2022, and that he had been treated at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

He is survived by Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.