Dead Celebrity Alert

Science fiction writer and poet Thomas Disch has committed suicide. Disch died July 4 and his body was discovered July 5, according to the New York City Police Department. He was 68.

The author of popular sci-fi novels Camp Concentration and 334, Disch had been openly gay since 1968. Following the 2004 death of his partner, poet Charles Naylor, Disch reportedly began suffering from depression.

Awarded many honors for his fiction, including two O. Henry awards, the genre-bending Disch also published more than a half dozen books of poetry, a whimsical Child’s Garden of Grammar (1997); a history of speculative fiction, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998); and the Brave Little Toaster series for children. … Read full obituary

January 9, 1931 - June 9, 2008

Algis Budrys was one of the writers who made his name alongside such luminaries as Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick in the early-1950s boom in science-fiction magazines. …

Budrys’s first novel, False Night, published by the small New York firm Lion Books in 1954, tells of the slow recovery of the world after it has been devastated by a plague. In his second novel, Man of Earth (1958), circumstances force the weedy businessman protagonist, Allen Sibley, to buy himself a new, much-improved body and then light out for Pluto, but he ends up with a mind that does not belong to him or his alter ego.

Budrys’s Who? (1958) was greeted as one of the science-fiction genre’s most humane studies of dehumanisation. … Read full obituary

March 29, 1915 - March 28, 2008

Novelist Helen Yglesias’s death, a day before her 93rd birthday, recalls “a contented middle-aged couple sat up in bed, seen from the waist up in neatly pressed pyjamas with the piped edge of the lapels wonderfully reproduced in stone, faint smiles upon their modeled lips, their deep-set eyes gazing pleasantly upon the prospect of their buried bodies which became a natural extension of the stone figures”. This graveyard features in Sweetsir (1981), the best-known of her five novels, the first published at fifty-seven: in these, marriage oftens proves rockier than that stone’s depiction. … Read full obituary

October 28, 1926 - May 5, 2008

Park Kyung Ni was one of the leading South Korean novelists of her generation. In her own country and abroad, she was best known for the epic Toji (The Land), widely regarded as the greatest achievement of modern Korean literature.

Born in the city of Tongyeong in South Gyeongsang province at the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula, Park graduated from Jinju Girls High School in 1946. During the Korean War, which broke out in 1950, she suffered a personal tragedy; her husband Kim Haeng Do, whom she had married shortly after leaving school, went missing in action. This sorrow, and the larger traumas of the war became the subject of much of Park’s early fiction, the author herself observing that she would not have written novels if she had been happy. … Read full obituary

Nuala O’Faolain, journalist and writer, was born on March 1, 1940. She died of cancer on May 9, 2008, aged 68

Nuala O’Faolain, then 55, had been writing a current affairs column on The Irish Times for almost ten years and was rather feeling that life had passed her by when, in 1995, a publisher offered to make a book out of the best of her articles. To show where she was coming from, she decided to write a short introduction about her own life.

It ended up as a book of more than 200 pages entitled Are You Somebody? — The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, spilling the beans on her dysfunctional background and her rather disordered love life. She revealed a 15-year lesbian affair with her fellow-columnist Nell McCafferty that had just ended, like her previous romances with men, in tears. …Read full obituary

Robin Moore’s subjects as a writer included Pope John Paul II and the notorious former call girl, Xaviera Hollander with whom he wrote The Happy Hooker. In 1969 he wrote the novel, The French Connection, on which the acclaimed film was based. …

For a time Moore settled down to run a smallholding in Jamaica while writing schlock paperbacks. But hankering for wilder action than mucking out pigs, he trained with the US Army’s Green Berets whose Vietnam service yielded his multi-million selling The Green Berets (1965). This was further promoted by collaboration with an injured staff sergeant, Barry Sadler, on the rousingly patriotic song Ballad of the Green Berets in 1966. The Green Berets was made into a film, starring John Wayne, in 1968. …

He is survived by his fifth wife, Helen, and by two daughters.

Robin Moore, writer, was born on October 31, 1925. He died on February 21, 2008, aged 82 … Read full obituary

Thriller writer, creator of the private investigator Jacob Asch and author of a study of American satanism …

His satanic interests led to a non-fiction study, The Second Coming: Satanism in America (1970). It inspired his first Jacob Asch novel, The Dead Are Discreet (1974).

Whether in the boxing world of Dead Ringer (1977), or the slaughter houses of The Killing Floor (1976), or even music industry of Three With a Bullet (1984), Asch’s asides were the main entertainment… Read full obituary

The esteemed Martinique poet and politician Aimé Césaire, a leading figure in the movement for black consciousness, died Thursday, the French president’s office and a hospital said. He was 94.

Césaire died in Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, the hospital that was treating him said.

Césaire was involved in the fight for French West Indian rights, and he also served as a lawmaker in the lower house of France’s parliament for nearly 50 years. French President Nicolas Sarkozy successfully led a campaign last year to change the name of Martinique’s airport in honor of Césaire. …

Césaire’s 1950 “Discourse on Colonialism” has become a classic of French political literature and helped develop the concept of negritude, which urges blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. … Read full obituary

LONDON — She was an innocent beauty working in the catering department of a wartime ministry. He was making government films by day and writing poems at night. …

A poem soon followed — and “A Subaltern’s Love Song” became the most popular work of John Betjeman, one of his generation’s most loved poets.Joan Hunter Dunn, the muse who inspired the classic poem of love and longing, died in a London nursing home last week at age 92. She changed her name after she married and was known as Joan Jackson.

But she will be forever associated with the poem that captured her in the first bloom of youth. … Read full obituary

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — Writer Hugo Claus — an artist, poet, playwright and novelist whose books painted a scathing picture of repression and hypocrisy in bourgeois Flanders — died Wednesday by euthanasia, his wife said. He was 78.

Claus, who had Alzheimer’s disease, died at Middelheim Hospital in Antwerp. “He himself picked the moment of his death and asked for euthanasia,” not wanting to extend his suffering, his wife, Veerle De Wit, said in a statement. …

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 his native Flanders in northern Belgium.

The partly autobiographical work defined his career and shot him to prominence on the international scene. … Read full obituary

Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and a man considered one of the world’s top science fiction writers, has died.

He was 90. An aide announced his death Tuesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. …

Clarke had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair. …

A scientist whose work helped lead to the creation of modern satellite systems and early space exploration, his work bridged art and science. …

With Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, he was considered one of the “Big Three” of science fiction.

His fiction predicted space travel before rockets were even test fired and foretold computers wreaking havoc with modern life. Clarke was a lone voice of dissent when the world feared that the Y2K bug would lead to mayhem in 2000. … Read full obituary

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) — Margaret Truman, the only child of former President Harry S. Truman who became a concert singer, actress, radio and TV personality and mystery writer, died Tuesday. She was 83.

Truman, known as Margaret Truman Daniel in private life, died at a Chicago assisted living facility following a brief illness, according to a statement from the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence. She had been at the facility for the past several weeks and was on a respirator, the library said.

Her father’s succession to the presidency in 1945 thrust her into the national spotlight while a college junior. …

Her singing career attracted the barbs of music critics — even the embarrassment of having her father threaten one reviewer. …

She published her first book, an autobiography titled “Souvenir,” in 1956. … Read full obituary

NEW YORK (AP) — Best-selling writer Ira Levin, whose novels included the horror classic “Rosemary’s Baby,” the Nazi thriller “The Boys From Brazil” and the satirical fantasy “The Stepford Wives,” has died. He was 78.

Levin suffered a fatal heart attack in his Manhattan apartment on Monday, said agent Phyllis Westberg. …

Levin began working as a TV writer before finishing his first novel, “A Kiss Before Dying,” a murder mystery that was an instant success. His debut won the Edgar Allan Poe Award as the best first novel of 1953. …

Levin also wrote the long-running Broadway hit “Deathtrap,” which debuted in February 1978. … Read full obituary

HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) — Author Madeleine L’Engle, whose novel “A Wrinkle in Time” has been enjoyed by generations of schoolchildren and adults since the 1960s, has died, her publicist said Friday. She was 88. …

The Newbery Medal winner wrote more than 60 books, including fantasies, poetry and memoirs, often highlighting spiritual themes and her Christian faith. …

“A Wrinkle in Time” — which L’Engle said was rejected repeatedly before it found a publisher in 1962 — won the American Library Association’s 1963 Newbery Medal for best American children’s book. … Read full obituary

Senegalese movie icon, Ousmane Sembene, died on Saturday evening in Dakar at the age of 84, following a protracted illness. Sembene, who will long be remembered as the “father of the African cinema”, adapted most of his novels for the movie. Some of the novels include: ‘Borom Saret’ in 1963, ‘La Noire de …’ (1966), ‘Le Mandat’ (1968), ‘Xala’ (1974), ‘Guelawar’ in 1992 and his last feature-length film ‘Molade’ in 2004.

His produced 14 movies most of which, have received international awards. They were seen as a fascinating portrayal of post-colonial Africa, with a mixture of tradition and conflicts that broke out on the continent.

During his almost 50-year career, the self-taught man, who left primary school at 13 in his hometown of Ziguinchor (South of Senegal), embarked on a writing career during which he published ‘Le Docker Noir’ (The Black Docker), ‘Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu’ (God’s Bits of Wood)’, ‘l’Harmattan”, and ‘Le Mandat’. … Read full obituary