Death of Paul Auster: Actes Sud says he is “lucky” to have been his publisher in France

“Paul Auster is not, in the Actes Sud catalog, one author among others. His encounter with our editions – at the time almost as unknown as he himself was in his own country – dates from a trip by Hubert Nyssen to New York in the mid-1980s,” recalled the publishing house in a press release.

“Being his editor – or his editor, in this case Marie-Catherine Vacher – was a chance and became for Actes Sud a business card circulating widely in the ever-widening circle of Paul Auster’s friends,” he said. added.

Aged 77, the writer died at his home in Brooklyn, New York (United States), his friend Jacki Lyden said in an email to AFP. Born in New Jersey, Paul Auster became a New York literary icon. Author of around thirty books, he has been translated into more than 40 languages.

After his studies, he lived in Paris from 1971 to 1975 and translated French poets. Revered in France, which he considered his “second country”, he received the Foreign Medici Prize for Leviathan in 1993.

In a message posted on part of the jury in 1997, expressed his “great sadness” to learn of his death. “With the disappearance of Paul Auster, one of the most fervent voices of the city that never sleeps has died,” lamented the festival.