Paul Auster, author of The New York trilogy, dies aged 77

His death was confirmed by his friend and fellow novelist, Jacki Lyden.

In March 2023, Auster’s wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt, announced he had been diagnosed with cancer.

Auster grew up in Newark, New Jersey, before moving to New York to attend Columbia University.

Auster’s writing career began in 1982 with his memoir The Invention of Solitude.

But his breakthrough came with his first novel, City of Glass, which was rejected by 17 publishers before it was taken by a small press in California in 1985.

The novel became the first instalment in his best-known work The New York Trilogy – three novels later combined in a single volume.

The plot revolves around a mystery writer, Daniel Quinn, who, after he is mistaken for a private detective, takes on their identity and is drawn into trying to solve a huge mystery.

His subsequent novels included Timbuktu, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance and Leviathan.

Auster wrote an impressive 34 books over the course of his career, with his last, titled Baumgartner, being released this year.

Auster became widely-known for his "highly stylised, quirkily riddlesome postmodernist fiction in which narrators are rarely other than unreliable and the bedrock of plot is continually shifting," the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote about the late writer back in 2010.

The writer received a number of accolades for his work, and was awarded Spain's Prince of Asturias prize for literature in 2006, as well as the Prix Médicis Étranger in 1993 for his novel Leviathan.

He also wrote the screenplay for the 1995 film Smoke, which starred Harvey Keitel, and co-directed the follow-up, Blue in the Face.

Auster is survived by his wife, their daughter, his sister and a grandson.