Marjane Satrapi, the French-Iranian artist, film-maker and graphic novelist whose acclaimed memoir Persepolis helped reshape international perceptions of Iran, has died at the age of 56.

In a statement provided to French news agency AFP, relatives said she had “died of sadness” after the death of her husband, the Swedish producer Mattias Ripa.

Ripa died on 8 April last year. Later that month, a series of messages posted on Satrapi’s Instagram account revealed the phrase: “For I lost the love of my life.”

Tributes have been paid to Satrapi from across French politics and culture following news of her death. President Emmanuel Macron said Satrapi was “a great artist who turned her Iranian childhood into a universal tale,” adding: “With her childlike perspective, her irony, her tenderness, her inner demons, the author created a moving world with which readers identified.”

Writing on X, Yaël Braun-Pivet, president of the French National Assembly, said: “Marjane Satrapi had turned her work into an act of freedom. With Persepolis, she had given a face and a voice to the Iranian revolution, proudly carrying the fight for women’s freedom and dignity. France loses an immense artist. To her family, to her loved ones, I offer my most sincere thoughts.”

Born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran, near the Caspian Sea, Satrapi was raised in Tehran by her father, an engineer, and her mother, a dress designer. As a teenager, she left Iran after her parents sent her to Europe to continue her education, hoping to spare her from the restrictions imposed under the Islamic Republic. She eventually settled in France, arriving in 1994 and later becoming a French citizen in 2006.

Throughout her life, Satrapi was a vocal opponent of Iran’s clerical establishment.

In 2000 she published Persepolis, a comic book memoir that became an international publishing phenomenon. It told the story of a rebellious and outspoken young girl navigating the upheaval in Iran after the shah is overthrown in 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. The story follows the protagonist’s attempts to understand the country’s violence and ideological control before she is sent alone to Europe at the age of 14.

Satrapi told the Guardian in 2024 that Persepolis was about making western readers reflect on the humanity of Iranian people, that, “Oh, they’re actually human beings like us”.

The memoir sold millions of copies, established Satrapi as one of the most widely read Iranian authors in the world, and its success challenged many western assumptions about Iranian society and culture.

Satrapi has described how she initially had little expectation that Persepolis would reach publication. At the time, she was still an arts student in Strasbourg and had relatively limited professional experience in comics. “With Persepolis, I didn’t even think I’d find a publisher,” she told El País in 2020. “I thought I’d make 50 photocopies for my friends to read.”

Satrapi later co-directed the animated film adaptation of Persepolis, which became an international hit and earned her a place in Oscar history as the first woman nominated for the Academy award for best animated feature.

She has said that the purpose of her comic books was to reassure young Iranians that they were being heard and supported by the outside world. “If they kill you and the whole world doesn’t care, how is that? This is the whole thing I’m asking: just recognise this.”

Of her choice of medium, she said in a 2012 interview that: “Drawing – it’s the first language of human beings, before writing, before even talking, before words.”

Satrapi went on to direct five feature films, including Radioactive (2019), starring Rosamund Pike as the pioneering scientist Marie Curie.

After leaving comics for years, in 2024, she returned to the medium, coordinating Woman, Life, Freedom, a collaborative graphic work bringing together 17 Iranian and international comic artists alongside academics and researchers. The book examined the protest movement that emerged after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman detained in 2022 for allegedly failing to comply with Iran’s mandatory headscarf rules.

Discussing the book, Satrapi said: “The only thing I can do is cultural work … This book is a message to the Iranian people to say, ­listen, you are not alone.”

Margaret Atwood told the Guardian: “I was saddened to hear of the death of Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis made a huge impact. It depicts the same kinds of struggles – but in real life – that the characters in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments undergo. The repression of ordinary women in a theocratic regime, the secret rebellions, the depression, the courage scraped up to carry on; but I only wrote about it, while Marjane Satrapi lived it. Right now, with Iran in the midst of yet another war and control over the population intense, her work is more pertinent than ever.”

French journalist Tristane Banon paid tribute to Satrapi on X, writing: “Marjane … you won’t call me to wish me a happy birthday and “celebrate those little cheeks that I adore”… and I can’t get over it. You were freedom and determination. Courage too. One day, the Iranian people will be free, with you and as much as you.”

Valérie Pécresse, president of the Regional Council of Île-de-France, said: “Great sadness upon hearing of the passing of my friend Marjane Satrapi. She was a great artist, comics creator, painter, film-maker, but above all a passionate and committed woman.

“From Persepolis to her biopic of Marie Curie, Radioactive, she established herself as a major voice in the defense of democracy and women’s rights in Iran and around the world. The death of her companion had deeply affected her. I think with affection of her loved ones and her family.”

Maureen Duffy, author of more than 60 works and a pioneering activist for gay rights and writers’ rights, has died at the age of 92.

Duffy was awarded the inaugural £10,000 Royal Society of Literature (RSL) Pioneer prize last year by Bernardine Evaristo, who described her as a “true trailblazer in every sense of the word”.

She was an “extraordinary author” and a “tireless advocate for authors’ rights”, said Barbara Hayes, chief executive of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), of which Duffy was a founding member. “For decades, she championed fair remuneration and proper recognition for creators with remarkable passion and conviction, leaving an enduring legacy for writers everywhere.”

Duffy, who died on Wednesday, wrote novels, plays, poetry and nonfiction, including The Microcosm, her landmark 1966 novel inspired by the Gateways lesbian club in London, and Restitution, which was longlisted for the Booker prize in 1998.

Born in Worthing, Sussex, in 1933, Duffy’s father left when she was a baby, and her mother died when she was 15. She won her first poetry competition aged 17, and studied English at King’s College London, graduating in 1956. The university would later inspire the Queen’s College London of her novel Capital, the second in her London trilogy. In the late 1950s, she taught in Naples and London while editing poetry journals.

In 1961, Granada Television commissioned her to write a screenplay, Josie, and she used the £450 advance to buy a houseboat. Her semi-autobiographical first novel, That’s How It Was, was published the following year, a bildungsroman following a girl, Paddy, whose father abandons her mother when she is born .

Alongside her novels, Duffy wrote for stage, screen and radio, as well as poetry collections and biographies, including a study of Aphra Behn, considered the first woman to earn a living by writing.

In the early 1960s, Duffy began campaigning for gay rights. In the 1970s, she often wrote for lesbian feminist journal Sappho, and in 1977, she published The Ballad of the Blasphemy Trial, a poem strongly condemning the infamous trial of the Gay News for blasphemous libel.

In 1972, Duffy co-founded the Writers’ Action Group, which led a campaign for a public lending right, ultimately made law in the late 70s, allowing authors to be paid each time their work is lent through libraries. This work led to the establishment of ALCS in 1977, aimed at ensuring authors are paid for secondary uses of their work.

“I’ve always been interested in politics and there’s a sort of bloody-mindedness in me that wants to take issues on,” Duffy said in 2017. “It’s a continuous battle. As well as authors’ rights, I’ve also been a campaigner for gay rights and animal rights. I feel very strongly that you have to stand up and play your part.”

British poet Carol Rumens, whose Guardian poem of the week column ran for nearly 20 years and was beloved among its loyal readership, has died aged 81.

Her family said that she died peacefully on 25 April, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.

Rumens’ poems, often profoundly political, were published across more than a dozen collections, including Animal People, De Chirico’s Threads and Blind Spots. She also wrote plays, fiction, criticism and published poetry in translation.

She began writing the Guardian poem of the week column in October 2007. Over two decades, she developed an engaged readership, responding to each column in the comments section.

Rumens was born on 10 December 1944 in Forest Hill, south London. She began a philosophy degree, but left before finishing it and later received a postgraduate diploma in writing for stage from City College Manchester.

Her first collection, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours, was published in 1973. In the mid-70s, she worked as an editor on Croydon-based magazine Pick, before becoming poetry editor at Quarto and Literary Review in the early 80s.

Through the 80s, she published several collections, including Star Whisper, The Greening of the Snow Beach and her first volume of selected poems. She also collaborated on the first of several translated volumes of poetry from Russian, by poets including Evgeny Rein and Irina Ratushinskaya. Poetry in translation “revitalises our daily, cliche-haunted vocabulary”, Rumens wrote in 2007. “It extends us in the way real travelling does, giving us new sounds, sights and smells.”

Rumens taught at a number of universities, including the University of Hull, where she established an MA in creative writing, and the University of Bangor, where she was a longtime visiting professor.

The poet was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984. She was shortlisted for the Forward poetry prize for best single poem twice, and the same year, she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley award.

Her first Guardian poem of the week choice in was Far Rockaway by the Welsh-language poet Iwan Llwyd, translated by Robert Minhinnick. Over the following two decades, she would write nearly 1,000 columns, featuring poems by household names in between those of lesser-known writers.

For her final column, published in February, she chose two poems by Matthew Rice. In the comments section, one reader thanked her for her “usual great choice of poems and erudite introduction”.

In 2019, a collection of 52 poem of the week columns and their accompanying commentaries were published in a book titled Smart Devices.

“I’m still surprised to find myself writing a weekly blog at all,” Rumens wrote in 2019. She described feeling “electrified” by the research process behind the columns. “To lift off from the launching pad of a poem, and bounce and float through the galaxies of Search, learning bits and pieces which ought to be unrelated but which mesh because I am their narrator, is as exciting as the process of writing a poem – and, in fact, remarkably similar to it.”

Taking on the column, “I think I wanted to learn how to think about poems, as well as find out what I thought of them,” she continued. “That’s the selfish, self-loving bit. The more altruistic motive is that I feel poets owe each other (or each other’s poems) a duty of care. One person can’t do very much but they can do something, make a few sounds to erase the stupid silence which hangs around poems and collections of poems.

“I’m sick of hearing that too much poetry is written and published. No, too little poetry is taught and read. A poem isn’t usually a butterfly or a mobile phone. It deserves a longer life. I wish I wrote better about poems and poetry, but I know I should go on writing, any way, as best I can.”

Jeremy Halvard Prynne, known as JH Prynne, a maverick figure in British poetry, died on 22 April at the age of 89.

“Jeremy was an extraordinary and original human, which is no surprise because he was an extraordinary and original poet,” said Peter Gizzi, the American poet who introduced a reissue of Prynne’s 1969 collection The White Stones. “The word ‘genius’ gets tossed around, but if anyone was, he certainly was.”

Born in Bromley, Kent, in June 1936, Prynne served two years in the British army before studying English at Cambridge, graduating in 1960. He pursued a fellowship at Harvard before returning to Cambridge, becoming a fellow at Gonville and Caius college. He ultimately became director of studies in English, and for 37 years was also the college librarian.

Prynne’s first collection, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems, was published in 1962. A second, Kitchen Poems, appeared in 1968. Influenced by the likes of Charles Olson, Prynne – in both his teaching and his poems – bridged American postmodern and British poetry circles, and acted as a liberating force on the latter. He was prolific, publishing dozens of collections across the decades, almost exclusively with small presses, and emerged as a cult figure despite his aversion to publicity, interviews, poetry readings and having his photograph taken.

His work has been collected in two volumes titled Poems, the second of which was published in 2024. “While one might have expected an update of Prynne’s already monumental Poems, the arrival of more than 700 pages of new work is a remarkable turn of events,” wrote David Wheatley in a review. “Here is a book to keep us busy for a very long time.”

A common observation, made by fans and critics alike, was that Prynne’s poetry was hard to parse. “Whether we ‘understood’ Prynne’s poetry or not, we were ardent admirers already,” wrote the British novelist Geoff Nicholson in 2011. “The obscurity was part of the appeal.”

The journalist John Simpson, who worked with Prynne in the 1960s on Granta magazine, “couldn’t understand” Prynne’s poetry, “and still can’t, but he was a charming, witty, elegant figure”, he wrote on X, following news of the poet’s death.

Beyond Cambridge, Prynne also taught and lectured at Surrey, Sussex and at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. Along with his poetry, he published lectures and criticism on subjects ranging from Willem de Kooning to Shakespeare.

Prynne’s “generosity is legion; his teaching is the stuff of legend,” added Gizzi, whose recent collection, Fierce Elegy, won the TS Eliot prize. “For all his astounding brilliance he was down to earth and deeply kind. I cherish every moment I was fortunate enough to be in his company. He was and will remain a bright element. His passing is an enormous and incalculable loss to the world of UK letters.”

David Malouf, the acclaimed Australian author of books including Ransom, An Imaginary Life and the Booker prize-nominated Remembering Babylon, has died aged 92.

Malouf died on Wednesday, his publisher, Penguin Random House Australia, said in a statement on Thursday.

“We are deeply saddened to share that author and poet David Malouf AO has passed away,” the statement said. “David Malouf wrote across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, libretti and plays, and made a significant and continued impact on Australian literature.”

“David won numerous prizes for his work, including the Miles Franklin Award, Commonwealth Writers’ prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and Australia-Asia Literary Award. He was also an admired teacher and lecturer both in Australia and Europe.”

“Alongside his achievements as a writer, David was a loyal, loving friend to many and devoted to his family. He was a passionate supporter of Opera Australia, Adelaide Writers Week and the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.”

Born in Brisbane in 1934 to a Lebanese Australian father and an English-born mother of Portuguese and Sephardic Jewish descent, Malouf was an avid reader at an early age, reading the complete works of Shakespeare from the age of 10.

Malouf began writing poetry, usually about his childhood, his family, travelling and his connections to Europe and Australia; his first work was published in 1962. He was also known as a gifted short story writer, publishing five collections over three decades.

His first novel, 1975’s Johnno, was semi-autobiographical, following a young man growing up in Brisbane during the second world war.

His 1993 book, Remembering Babylon, made him a literary name: the tale of a young shipwreck survivor rescued and raised by Aboriginal people was shortlisted for the Booker prize. It also won the Commonwealth writers’ prize and the first International Dublin Literary award.

Much of Malouf’s writing focused on the past – his own childhood, on great myths, on colonial Australia.

“He has a poet’s sensibility, but there is nothing brazenly poetic about his prose,” Rick Gekoski wrote in the Guardian in 2011.

“One is constantly astonished by the vivacity and accuracy of the writing, and it is hardly possible to read a page of Malouf without a smile of delight and gratitude.”

Malouf’s final novel, Ransom, was published in 2009, after a 13-year gap between novels. The book, a retelling of Priam’s appeal to Achilles for the return of his son Hector’s body in the Iliad, received acclaim around the world and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary award. Malouf’s final published book was a volume of poetry, An Open Book (2018).

Malouf was also a fan of opera, sitting on the board of Opera Australia and writing criticism and several libretti himself, including an adaptation of Patrick White’s Voss.

The author was gay, and openly so for much of his life, but remained discreet in his relationships before and after fame arrived; close friends reported not knowing anything about his personal life.

He was often hailed by critics and other authors as a great chronicler of Australia, uniquely capturing something of its innate character, which he rejected.

“I don’t consider myself a representative Australian and I’m not a representative Queenslander,” he once said.

“I think each one of us is individual and we take exactly what suits us best. Whether we’re men, women, gay or ethnic, we take up what we can use. I think that’s one of the great privileges of being Australians. We have that kind of freedom and we’ve given up, I hope, the very narrow idea we have to think of ourselves as Australians. We can be whatever we want to be.”

Acclaimed Australian author Helen Garner said she would remember Malouf for his kindness, encouragement and love of laughter.

“David gave me a great deal of encouragement when I was starting out,” Garner said.

“He knew how to be useful when he saw a friend going down for the third time in a mess of her own making: his kindness in a crisis was imaginative and very practical. He was witty and he loved to laugh. In recent years our lives changed direction and we drifted apart. Foolishly, I imagined he would live on for ever in his high apartment up there in Surfers (Paradise). I’m shocked and sad to hear that he’s gone.”

Alexander Kluge, a German film-maker and author who elevated cinematic collages into an art form and won the top prize at the Venice film festival in 1968, has died aged 94, his publisher has announced.

A former assistant of expressionist master Fritz Lang, Kluge was an accomplished director of intellectually rewarding, if at times oblique filmic essays, and an ever-productive writer of short fiction.

He also played a key role in organising the rule-breaking New German Cinema movement that brought forth better-known auteurs such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, and he continued to bring experimental film to the small screen in his later years.

Along with the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who died earlier this month aged 96, Kluge was one of the last living torchbearers of the Frankfurt school of neo-Marxist cultural criticism.

Born in 1932 in Halberstadt, Germany, Kluge narrowly survived the bombing of the city by Allied forces on 8 April 1945. After the war he studied law, history and church music at Frankfurt university, where he was mentored by the philosopher Theodor Adorno.

After starting to practise as a lawyer, he was increasingly drawn to literature and film, in 1962 signed the Oberhausen Manifesto which called on the German film industry to break free from shallow tearjerkers and patriotic Heimatfilme.

Abschied von Gestern (released as Yesterday Girl in the US) was one of the first films to emerge from the manifesto. The story of a Jewish woman who struggles to settle in West Germany after fleeing from the east, it was told in a jarring style, using discontinuous sound and a non-sequential narrative.

The film won the Silver Lion at the Venice film festival – the first by a German director to do so after the second world war. Kluge shored up his reputation by winning the Golden Lion two years later, with with Artists in the Big Top: Perplexed.

Kluge managed to sustain a rare balancing act, being both a public intellectual and a commercially successful film producer. In 1987, he founded production company DCTP, through which he made a regular stream of arts, magazine and interview programmes for German television.

His wartime experience made Kluge a committed pacifist, in ways that came to jar with a new generation of artists and writers in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a radio interview in 2022, he announced he had been happy to see US troops march into his home town in 1945, and that there was therefore “nothing evil about capitulation if it ends the war”. The interview was met with widespread disbelief for muddling up the historic lessons of an aggressor nation and those of states that had come under German attack.

In 2018, Kluge collaborated with the US author Ben Lerner on a “poetic dialogue” book, The Snows of Venice. “My language is not as beautiful as lyrics,” he told the Paris Review at the time. “This is something that you have to know how to do. Poets are diamond polishers. But there are also collectors of raw diamonds – I am a good archaeologist.”

Tracy Kidder, an award-winning narrative nonfiction writer who turned everything from computer engineering to life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers, has died. He was 80.

Kidder’s longtime publisher Random House confirmed his death in a statement on Wednesday: “Tracy’s gifts for storytelling and tireless reporting are an enduring reflection of the empathy, integrity, and endless curiosity he brought to everything he did.”

Kidder won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award for his 1981 work The Soul of a New Machine, which delved into the work of a fledgling computer company long before most people cared about the inner workings of Silicon Valley.

“It was like going into another country,” Kidder told the Associated Press at the time. “At first, I didn’t understand what anybody was saying.”

Over the decades, Kidder immersed himself in worlds he was previously unfamiliar with, producing richly researched books about topics that may not sound like light reading.

For 1989’s Among Schoolchildren, he spent a year in a fifth-grade classroom, highlighting the dedication of an inner-city teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Later, for 1993’s Old Friends, he observed the dark side of growing old in America while also chronicling how two friends maintained their dignity in a nursing home despite their infirmities.

Turning these events at a Northampton, Massachusetts, nursing home into a cohesive narrative was one of his major challenges, Kidder told the AP.

“Not a lot happens, and yet I think when you read it, you feel that a lot does. Small things have to count for a great deal,” he said.

In 2003, Kidder wrote Mountains Beyond Mountains, about a doctor’s effort to bring healthcare to Haiti. The work introduced Kidder’s work to a new generation of readers as numerous universities added it to their reading lists.

“Mountains Beyond Mountains changed my life – and the lives of so many others around the world,” John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, wrote on social media on Wednesday.

The book even inspired the indie rock band Arcade Fire’s 2010 hit Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).

All the while, Kidder was careful to eschew focusing on his longtime loves like fishing or baseball, afraid that if he spent too much time in one of those realms, it might cause him to “feel sick of it”.

Kidder was born in New York City in 1945 and attended Harvard University, where he signed up for the ROTC to avoid the Vietnam war draft.

After graduation, despite thinking he would be assigned a Washington communications intelligence role, Kidder was instead sent off to Vietnam, where the 22-year-old was placed in charge of an eight-man rear-echelon radio research detachment that monitored the communications of enemy units to try to pinpoint their locations.

Kidder documented the confounding experience in 2005’s My Detachment, an often humorous memoir that offered insights into the lives of the support troops who made up most of the 500,000-plus US military personnel who were in Vietnam at the height of the buildup when the author served there in 1968-1969. The war became an abstraction for Kidder, who never saw combat and knew the enemy only as “dots on a map”.

After the war, Kidder and his new wife, Frances Gray Toland, moved to the midwest so Kidder could enroll in the University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing program, where he latched on to the New Journalism wave pioneered by writers like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote.

Kidder hated the title “literary journalist”, telling the Dallas Morning News in 2010 that he found the description “pretentious”.

The term “creative nonfiction” irked him too: “It suggests we make things up.”

Instead, he saw himself as a storyteller.

“I don’t think of fiction and nonfiction as all that different, except that nonfiction is not invented,” he told the AP. “But I take exception to those people who think nonfiction should not appropriate the techniques of fiction … They belong to storytelling.”

Len Deighton, the British author whose subversive spy novels helped redefine the genre in the 1960s, has died aged 97.

Best known for his debut, The Ipcress File, Deighton went on to write more than 30 books over a career spanning four decades, establishing himself as one of the most distinctive voices in postwar fiction. His work, often compared to that of John le Carré, combined meticulous research with wit and sharp observations about class and bureaucracy.

Published in 1962, The Ipcress File was an immediate success, selling millions of copies worldwide. It introduced readers to an unnamed sardonic working-class intelligence officer who stood in stark contrast to the glamorous archetype embodied by Ian Fleming’s James Bond (Dr No, the first in the Bond film series, was released in the same year).

The novel’s success led to a film adaptation in 1965, starring Michael Caine in what would become a defining role. Caine reprised the character – now named Harry Palmer – in subsequent films. Decades later, the story was revisited in a 2022 television adaptation starring Peaky Blinders’ Joe Cole.

The author was born Leonard Cyril Deighton in Marylebone, London, in 1929. His father was a chauffeur and mechanic, and his mother was a hotel cook. As a child growing up in wartime London, Deighton saw his neighbour, the pro-Nazi spy Anna Wolkoff, arrested – a real-life drama that may have inspired the kinds of plots he would later construct in his novels.

Deighton’s education was disrupted by the second world war, during which he was moved to an emergency school. After leaving school, he worked as a railway clerk before national service with the Royal Air Force. After his demobilisation, he used a grant to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art and later the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1955.

Before turning to fiction, Deighton pursued a varied career. He worked as a flight attendant for British Overseas Airways Corporation and later as an illustrator in London and New York, producing advertising and designing more than 200 book covers. Among these was the first UK edition of On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

His interest in food also became a significant strand of his career. He had worked as a sous chef at the Royal Festival Hall, and later developed what became known as the “cookstrip” – a cartoon-style guide to cooking. These were published in a series for the Observer, helping to popularise Mediterranean cuisine in Britain, and anthologised in two books, Action Cook Book (1965) and Où Est Le Garlic? (1965).

Deighton started writing The Ipcress File while on an extended stay in the Dordogne region of France in 1960. Its success launched a prolific writing career that included numerous bestselling novels, many featuring recurring characters and interlinked storylines.

Deighton’s fiction often drew praise for its complex narrative structure. When he first submitted The Ipcress File to Jonathan Cape, the publisher of Ian Fleming, he was encouraged to simplify it; instead, he took the manuscript to Hodder & Stoughton.

His work also stood apart in the genre for its realism. In contrast to the exoticism associated with much earlier spy fiction, his novels emphasised bureaucracy, institutional rivalries and the moral ambiguities of intelligence work. He also included footnotes on the arcane details of spycraft. “Deighton reinvented the spy thriller, bringing in a new air of authenticity and playing with its form,” wrote Jeremy Duns in the Guardian in 2009.

Deighton became increasingly private towards the end of his career. He was married twice, first to the illustrator Shirley Thompson and later to Ysabelle de Ranitz, with whom he had two sons.

António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese novelist whose dark, polyphonic fiction confronted the traumas of dictatorship, war and Portuguese society, has died aged 83.

Widely regarded as one of the most important Portuguese writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, he produced more than 30 novels that reshaped Portuguese writing and made him a perennial contender for the Nobel prize for literature. He received numerous honours, including the Camões prize, the most prestigious award in the Portuguese language, and several major European literary prizes. His death was confirmed by the publisher Dom Quixote.

Born in Lisbon in 1942 into a middle-class family, Lobo Antunes was the son of a neurologist and initially followed his father into medicine. He trained as a psychiatrist and worked in hospitals for several years, experiences that would later inform the psychological intensity of his writing.

In the early 1970s he was drafted and sent to Angola to serve as an army doctor during Portugal’s brutal colonial war. The experience marked him profoundly. “There I learned that I wasn’t the centre of the world and that others existed,” he later told a journalist. The war’s moral disorientation and emotional wreckage would haunt much of his fiction. In 1973 Lobo Antunes returned to Lisbon, where he practised psychiatry and wrote in the evenings.

His first two novels, Elephant’s Memory and South of Nowhere, both published in 1979, drew on his experiences as a young doctor navigating the political and personal upheavals of post-revolutionary Portugal, and brought him instant acclaim.

It was his ambitious 1983 novel Fado Alexandrino that confirmed his status as a major literary voice. Structured as a long night of conversation between veterans and a captain during the colonial war, the 700-page book captured a generation’s disillusionment with the war and established many of the stylistic hallmarks that would define his work: fragmented narration, shifting perspectives and meandering, rhythmic sentences.

Over the following decades, Lobo Antunes developed a body of work that critics frequently compared to William Faulkner for its density and musical complexity. Novels such as The Inquisitors’ Manual (1996) and The Splendour of Portugal (1997) explored the lingering shadows of colonialism, the hypocrisies of the Portuguese elite and the dysfunction of family life.

His books often resist straightforward plot, instead unfolding through overlapping interior monologues in which multiple voices circle the same events from different angles. For some readers and critics, the style could be off-putting; for admirers it was precisely this difficulty that allowed Lobo Antunes to capture the fractured nature of memory and the persistence of historical trauma.

Though widely acclaimed internationally and translated into many languages, Lobo Antunes remained relatively little known in the English-speaking world.

In 1970 he married Maria José Xavier da Fonseca e Costa, with whom he had two daughters, Maria José Lobo Antunes and Joana Lobo Antunes. The couple later divorced. He subsequently married Maria João Espírito Santo Bustorff Silva, and they had a daughter, Maria Isabel Bustorff Lobo Antunes. After their divorce, he married Cristina Ferreira de Almeida in 2010.

He is survived by his wife, his three daughters and his three brothers, Miguel, Nuno and Manuel.

Dan Simmons, the author of more than 30 novels and short story collections spanning horror, political thrillers and science fiction such as Hyperion and The Terror, has died at age 77.

Simmons died in Longmont, Colorado on 21 February, with his wife and daughter at his side, his obituary announced.

The author was best known for Hyperion, his 1989 science fiction novel that won the prestigious Hugo award for best novel and a Locus award; Simmons later wrote three sequels.

Over his career he also won two World Fantasy awards, a dozen Locus awards, the Shirley Jackson award, and several Bram Stoker awards, while his 2007 novel The Terror, a fictionalised imagining of what happened on the doomed Franklin expedition, was adapted into an acclaimed television series in 2018.

Born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948, Simmons grew up in Illinois and Indiana. He worked as an elementary school teacher for 18 years, in Missouri, New York and Colorado, where he was once finalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year.

“Every day after lunch, Dan told his students a daily installment of an epic tale that started on the first day of school,” his obituary reads. “As they listened, the students would color illustrations that he’d drawn for them. When the story finally came to an end on the last day of school, many recall being reduced to tears. This story would go on to become Dan’s Hyperion Cantos.”

Simmons’s first novel, Song of Kali, was published in 1985. His other books include his 1989 vampire horror Carrion Comfort, 1991’s Summer of Night, the sci-fi epics Ilium and Olympos, and 2009’s Drood, based on the last years of Charles Dickens’s life.

His 2011 political thriller Flashback, however, was widely criticised as an anti-left rant, imagining a dystopian future where mass immigration, the climate change “hoax”, “socialist entitlement programs” and foreign policy failures under Barack Obama have led to the ruin of America, a “Second Holocaust” and the rise of an Islamic “New Global Caliphate”.

In response to the criticism, Simmons pointed out he’d written a short story version in 1991 that imagined a post-Reagan US, telling an interviewer: “I’ve been called a Nazi. I’ve been called a racist. People who have no idea of my life, what I’ve done, how I’ve worked for civil rights throughout my life, or what my politics have been, and what Democratic candidates I’ve written speeches for … They think I was just going after Obama in the book; well, it used to be Reagan, and if I had waited a few years it would be whoever else would be president.”

“Like his early reading pursuits, Dan always wrote about what he loved,” his obituary reads. “He defied literary norms by writing across genres, switching between major publishers, and defying pressure to conform to formulaic novels.

“Dan was a profoundly curious learner who delighted in connecting with other curious minds, and the many stories he dreamed up helped him connect with others throughout his entire life.”