This time it's venerable black American novelist Toni Morrison, as featured here only a few months ago. It was a little over nine years ago that Paradise featured on this blog, which represents the fourth-longest gap between the casting of the runes and the inevitable demon-summoning, after Anita Shreve, Justin Cartwright and Helen Dunmore. Morrison was 88, which is in a pretty popular range for this particular list: William Trevor and Ursula Le Guin were also 88, and 87 remains the most popular age for curse-related death with four victims. The average age is currently a smidgen under 82.
One other bit of related trivia: Toni Morrison and I share (well, shared) a birthday, February 18th. Other novelists to share this birthday include Nikos Kazantzakis, Wallace Stegner, Len Deighton and Jean M Auel.
| Author | Date of first book | Date of death | Age | Curse length |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michael Dibdin | 31st January 2007 | 30th March 2007 | 60 | 0y 59d |
| Beryl Bainbridge | 14th May 2008 | 2nd July 2010 | 77 | 2y 50d |
| Russell Hoban | 23rd August 2010 | 13th December 2011 | 86 | 1y 113d |
| Richard Matheson | 7th September 2011 | 23rd June 2013 | 87 | 1y 291d |
| Elmore Leonard | April 16th 2009 | 20th August 2013 | 87 | 4y 128d |
| Iain Banks | 6th November 2006 | 9th June 2013 | 59 | 6y 218d |
| Doris Lessing | 8th May 2007 | 17th November 2013 | 94 | 6y 196d |
| Gabriel García Márquez | 10th July 2007 | 17th April 2014 | 87 | 6y 284d |
| Ruth Rendell | 23rd December 2009 | 2nd May 2015 | 85 | 5y 132d |
| James Salter | 4th February 2014 | 19th June 2015 | 90 | 1y 136d |
| Henning Mankell | 6th May 2013 | 5th October 2015 | 67 | 2y 152d |
| Umberto Eco | 30th June 2012 | 19th February 2016 | 84 | 3y 234d |
| Anita Brookner | 15th July 2011 | 10th March 2016 | 87 | 4y 240d |
| William Trevor | 29th May 2010 | 20th November 2016 | 88 | 6y 177d |
| John Berger | 10th November 2009 | 2nd January 2017 | 90 | 7y 55d |
| Nicholas Mosley | 24th September 2011 | 28th February 2017 | 93 | 5y 159d |
| Helen Dunmore | 10th March 2008 | 5th June 2017 | 64 | 9y 89d |
| JP Donleavy | 21st May 2015 | 11th September 2017 | 91 | 2y 114d |
| Ursula Le Guin | 6th December 2015 | 22nd January 2018 | 88 | 2y 49d |
| Anita Shreve | 2nd September 2006 | 29th March 2018 | 71 | 11y 211d |
| Philip Roth | 23rd December 2017 | 22nd May 2018 | 85 | 0y 150d |
| Justin Cartwright | 7th September 2008 | 3rd December 2018 | 75 | 10y 89d |
| Toni Morrison | 18th July 2010 | 5th August 2019 | 88 | 9y 20d |
No comments:
Post a Comment