While I do my best to keep up with the steady snuffing out of the lives of novelists wreaked by this blog on an ongoing basis, I'm a busy man and I will occasionally miss one. It's happened a couple of times before that I've had to retrospectively insert a couple of lines in the list, here in 2019 for instance, and again here in 2021.
Anyway, it came to my attention during some random perusing of the internet (definitely not for porn, I deny that completely) that Isabel Colegate died back in March 2023. She was a double featuree here with 1981's The Shooting Party (her most celebrated novel) in 2009 and again in 2016 with 1964's Statues In A Garden, which (as I see I sort of said at the time) reads as an earlier and slightly less brilliant draft of the later book.
Colegate was 91, which is towards the higher end of the scale in terms of people featured on this list (Milan Kundera remains the oldest victim). The curse length is one of the longest ones (Kundera holds the record here too); to move the needle significantly on the average age of death (which remains around 82, or, if you prefer a median, 86) at this stage - there are 38 names on the list, all between 59 and 94 - a novelist would either have to die while still in the womb, or live to about 500. Not saying it can't happen, but it's unlikely.
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