Andrea Gibson, a celebrated poet and performance artist who through their verse explored gender identity, politics and their four-year battle with terminal ovarian cancer, has died aged 49.

Gibson’s death was announced on social media by their wife, Megan Falley.

Gibson and Falley are the main subjects of the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, which won the Festival Favorite award at the Sundance film festival and is scheduled to air on Apple TV+ later this year.

“Andrea Gibson died in their home (in Boulder, Colorado) surrounded by their wife, Meg, four ex-girlfriends, their mother and father, dozens of friends, and their three beloved dogs,” Monday’s announcement reads.

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The film, which explores the couple’s enduring love as Gibson battles cancer, is directed by Ryan White and includes an original song written by Gibson, Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile. During a screening at Sundance in January that left much of the audience in tears, Gibson said they didn’t expect to live long enough to see the documentary.

Tributes poured in Monday from friends, fans and fellow poets who said Gibson’s words had changed their lives, including writers Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert. Many LGBTQ+ fans said Gibson’s poetry helped them learn to love themselves. People with cancer and other terminal illnesses said Gibson made them less afraid of death by reminding them that we never really leave the ones we love.

In a poem Gibson wrote shortly before they died, titled Love Letter from the Afterlife, they wrote: “Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before.”

Linda Williams Stay was “awestruck” when her son, Aiden, took her to hear Gibson perform at a bar in San Francisco a decade ago. Their poetry was electrifying, lighting up the room with laughter, tears and love. Gibson’s poetry became a shared interest for the mother and son, and eventually helped Stay better understand her son when he came out as transgender.

“My son this morning, when he called, we just sobbed together,” Stay said. “He says, ‘Mom, Andrea saved my life.’”

Gibson’s poetry later helped Stay cope with a cancer diagnosis of her own, which brought her son back home to St George, Utah, to help take care of her. They were delighted when Gibson accepted their invitation to perform at an event celebrating the LGBTQ+ community in southern Utah.

“It was truly life-changing for our community down there, and even for our allies,” Stay said. “I hope that they got a glimpse of the magnitude of their impact for queer kids in small communities that they gave so much hope to.”

Gibson was born in Maine and moved to Colorado in the late 1990s, where they had served for the past two years as the state’s poet laureate. Their books included You Better Be Lightning, Take Me With You and Lord of the Butterflies.

Colorado governor Jared Polis said on Monday that Gibson was “truly one of a kind” and had “a unique ability to connect with the vast and diverse poetry lovers of Colorado”.

The comedian Tig Notaro, an executive producer on the documentary and Gibson’s friend of 25 years, shared on Instagram how the two came up together as performers in Colorado. Hearing Gibson perform for the first time was like witnessing the “pure essence of an old-school genuine rock star”, and their words have guided Notaro through life ever since, she said.

“The final past few days of Andrea’s life were so painful to witness, but simultaneously one of the most beautiful experiences of all of our lives,” Notaro said. “Surrounded by real human connection unfolding in the most unlikely ways during one of the most devastating losses has given me a gift that I will never be able to put into meaningful words.”

Gibson’s illness inspired many poems about mortality, depression, life and what happens next. In the 2021 poem How the Worst Day of My Life Became My Best, Gibson declared: “When I realized the storm / was inevitable, I made it / my medicine.” Two years later, they wondered: “Will the afterlife be harder if I remember / the people I love, or forget them?

“Either way, please let me remember.”

Salman Rushdie will be the subject of a new documentary on his life and attempted assassination in 2022.

Alex Gibney, the documentarian behind such films The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Taxi to the Dark Side, will direct Knife, inspired by Rushdie’s memoir of the same name which was published in April.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder recounts the Indian-born, British American novelist’s life and career, as well as the onstage stabbing in August 2022 that left him temporarily on a ventilator. The 76-year-old writer was speaking at an event in Chautauqua, New York, when a 24-year-old man from New Jersey rushed the stage and attacked him with a knife, stabbing him 15 times in the head, neck and chest. Rushdie lost vision in one eye and use of one hand as a result of the attack.

The film, first reported by Variety, will explore Rushdie’s recovery “in the broadest sense” using never-before-seen personal footage shot by his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths, according to a press release. The film will cover both Rushdie’s physical and spiritual healing, from a book that was “necessary” him to write – “a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art”, he said.

The book delayed the trial of Rushdie’s alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, who pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and has been held without bail since the attack.

Knife will draw from Griffiths’s footage – the couple had been married just 11 months before the attack – as well as interviews and excerpts from Rushdie’s work, including the fatwa calling for his death issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 for his book The Satanic Verses.

“It’s a delight and an honor to make this film about Salman Rushdie, an extraordinary novelist, a funny, poignant and resilient man, and one of the world’s most courageous defenders of freedom of speech,” Gibney said in a statement. “The opportunity to make this film about his recovery – in the broadest sense of the term – comes at a critical time. It gives me hope.”

Rushdie added in a statement: “I’m delighted we have Alex working with us on this film. We have long admired his brilliant work, from Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear to his recent portrait of Paul Simon. There couldn’t be a better person for the job.”

Gibney has already begun production on Knife, which is seeking a distributor. The Oscar-winning film-maker’s latest project, Musk, about the entrepreneur and world’s richest man Elon Musk, is forthcoming this year from HBO.

A novel with the title “Martyr!” arrives on the scene preloaded and explosive. The word is fraught, even more so now than when the book’s author, the Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar, chose it. There’s humor in the exclamation mark, but there’s something else, too. It signals that Akbar is fascinated with words in action, words that someone has reached for in a state of excitation, like joy or deep grief. The shouter of “Martyr!” bears something within him which he is determined to force the word to express. But the title’s punctuation ironizes or undercuts this intention, as if to suggest that language signifies in ways that are impossible to control. In “Martyr!,” Akbar plays this struggle—the struggle to make words mean what you want them to mean—for laughs, but he’s also deadly serious.

The person exclaiming “martyr!” in “Martyr!” is Cyrus Shams, a poet and former alcoholic, who was also formerly addicted to drugs. Cyrus is in his late twenties. He’s anguished and ardent about the world and his place in it, and recovery has left him newly and painfully obsessed with his deficiencies. “Beautiful terrible,” he writes in one of his Word docs, “how sobriety disabuses you of the sense of your having been a gloriously misunderstood scumbag prince shuffling between this or that narcotic crown.” Severed from his addictions, Cyrus can no longer stave off the state of mind that he describes as the “big pathological sad”: “It’s like a giant bowling ball on the bed,” he says, “everything kind of rolls into it.” When a mentor asks him about his most cherished dreams for himself, the words sneak out of him unbidden: “I want to die.”

Cyrus’s depression both is and isn’t circumstantial. His parents are dead. His A. A. sponsor has recently dismantled Cyrus’s delusion that he’s straight-passing, and his A. A. group is full of “fucking idiots” who’d “probably try to deport” him if they weren’t in a basement spouting bromides about surrender. After graduating with a literature degree from a state school in Indiana, Cyrus is working part time for the university hospital as a medical actor, pretending to have terminal illnesses so that doctors-in-training can practice their bedside manner. He feels as if he doesn’t belong anywhere: “awash in the world and its checkboxes,” Akbar writes, “neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk nor in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim.”

But the pathological sad is a product of temperament, too. Cyrus desires bigness, transcendence; he’s idealistic enough to bump against the paradoxes and hypocrisies of daily social interaction—“the rhetorical hygienics du jour”—and anxious enough to keep bumping, like an overactive Roomba. He is in perpetual ethical crisis: over whether to give his cup of coffee to a woman on the street, or how to repent for not noticing a friend’s new sneakers. Coupled with his self-awareness, his enthusiasms prove an isolating torment. “His whole life,” he reflects, “had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.”

Cyrus’s addictions spoiled him with peaks and nadirs, they brought “euphoric physical ecstasy” and “the most incapacitating white-light pain.” Now that he is sober, his world of extremes has contracted to a “textureless middle.” Desperate for purpose, he fixates on the idea of a death that retroactively splashes meaning back onto a life. He starts to collect stories about historical martyrs, such as Bobby Sands and Joan of Arc, for a book project, a suite of “elegies for people I’ve never met.” Akbar interleaves excerpts from this text, which Cyrus chips away at in a Word file that he titles BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx, with chapters told from the perspectives of Cyrus’s family members and with fantasy conversations between figures such as Lisa Simpson and a Trumpian President.

Cyrus’s obsession with martyrdom arises partly from the circumstances of his parents’ deaths. His mother, Roya, was a passenger on an Iranian plane that the United States Navy mistakenly shot out of the sky—an event based on the real-life destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 by the U.S.S. Vincennes, in 1988, near the end of the Iran-Iraq War. In America, the tragedy, which killed two hundred and ninety civilians, was excused and forgotten, but it cemented a deep distrust of the United States in Tehran, and Akbar said in an interview with the magazine Bidoun that he is “interested in what it means to feel rage thirty-five years later about an event that nobody in America even remembers.” In “Martyr!,” Cyrus contrasts his mother’s humanity with the statistic that she became in the U.S. Her fate was “actuarial,” he says, “a rounding error.”

Cyrus was only a few months old when Roya died; as if to outrun his sorrow, Cyrus’s father, Ali, emigrated with his son from Tehran to Indiana, where he found work on an industrial chicken farm. The job was lonely and bitter. Ali, who didn’t speak perfect English, would return home with talon scratches on his arms; he’d sit on the couch and drink gin in the twilight. Cyrus believes that his father waited until Cyrus went to college and then allowed his heart to stop. In the novel, both of Cyrus’s parents fall victim to the machine of American industrial capitalism, a force that would not have deserved their sacrifice even if they’d made it willingly. “My dad died anonymous after spending decades cleaning chicken shit,” Cyrus tells his A. A. sponsor. “I want my life—my death—to matter more than that.”

Akbar is sharp on the way that governments produce martyrs by treating human beings as insignificant or worse. Cyrus tells his friend and sometime lover Zee that the tragedy of his parents “wasn’t legible to the U.S. or to Iran. It’s not legible to empire.” At one point, Cyrus writes in BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx that he yearns to “die killing the president. Ours and everyone’s. I want them all to have been right to fear me. Right to have killed my mother, to have ruined my father. I want to be worthy of the great terror my existence inspires.” But Cyrus doesn’t have the stomach for violence; he can’t even accidentally pee in a hotel bed without leaving the maid an apologetic note and more twenty-dollar bills than he can afford. Although Akbar has incisive political points to make, he uses martyrdom primarily to think through more metaphysical questions about whether our pain matters, and to whom, and how it might be made to matter more. For Cyrus, who craves enormity, dying offers a way to scale himself up—to both escape from and reject a world that is determined to categorize his suffering and that of the people he cares about as meaningless.

Death is one technique for making injury meaningful; art is another. Art, a record of the obstacles we’ve surmounted or at least of the battles that haven’t killed us yet, “is where what we survive survives,” as Akbar wrote in a 2019 poem. Much of the plot of “Martyr!” takes shape around an Iranian American painter, Orkideh. Orkideh has terminal breast cancer and has used her diagnosis as material for an installation at the Brooklyn Museum: a Marina Abramović-style piece in which she sits in a black-metal folding chair and answers museumgoers’ questions about dying. Orkideh’s show, “Death-Speak,” captivates Cyrus as an example of “how to make a death useful.” He and Zee travel from Indiana to New York so that he can talk to her.

Once in Brooklyn, Cyrus encounters Orkideh three times, as in a fairy tale. In their first meeting, they circle around what might be worth martyring oneself for. Cyrus admits his desire to write “about secular, pacifist martyrs. People who gave their lives to something larger than themselves.” Orkideh suggests that he’s talking “about people who die for other people. . . . You’re talking about earth martyrs.” It’s a pretty idea, but Cyrus soon turns skeptical. After all, his father worked himself into the grave for his son—a decision that now strikes Cyrus as pathetic, even enraging. And human beings are fickle; worse, they are mortal. “People in my life have come and gone and come and gone,” Orkideh remarks. “Mostly they’ve gone.” How is sacrificing yourself for people who are already slipping deathward after you supposed to create permanent meaning?

Orkideh later narrates in her own chapter that she has submitted her life to a different divinity: art. “I spent every penny I had on canvas, brushes, paints,” she says. “I forced myself to forget my husband, my brother. My country. My son. . . . I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss.” Orkideh seems at first to fit the contemporary mold of the “art monster”: someone, traditionally a man, who allows his creative drive to eclipse his obligations to the people around him. But, in “Martyr!,” art itself is the monster. And Orkideh is a martyr to it, a person who has made all of her relationships secondary to the impossible task of representing the world truthfully.

Cyrus, the tortured poet, could also pour his life into the abyss. He exists in a book that rhapsodizes both with and about language, that understands the magic and power of words while playing up their addictiveness and potential for destruction. “When I learned how to say ‘cigarette,’ ” Orkideh recalls, “I walked around saying it to myself like a prayer, like an incantation. See-GARR-ett. It was my favorite word. If I walked up to someone and said it, one time in every five they’d hand me one. Language could make a meal like that.”

The novel itself is almost violently artful, full of sentences that stab, pierce, and slice with their beauty. Akbar favors a crescendoing syntactic structure to set up his top-shelf similes: “Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones”; “The Shams men began their lives in America awake, unnaturally alert, like two windows with the blinds torn off.” Reading this prose can feel like watching an Olympic athlete perform household tasks: Akbar’s writing has the musculature of poetry that can’t rely on narrative propulsion and so propels itself. It’s tonally nuanced—in command of a dazzling spectrum of frequencies from comedic to tragic—rigorous, and surprising.