HarperCollins pays tribute to 'fierce, curious, elegiac' Joan Didion after death, aged 87

HarperCollins has paid tribute to the "fierce, curious, elegiac" voice of author and journalist Joan Didion who has died, aged 87.

Didion's American publisher Knopf announced that Didion died at her home in Manhattan, New York, on 23rd December from Parkinson's disease. 

Nicholas Pearson, publishing director for her UK publisher Fourth Estate, said: "News of Joan Didion's death is an extremely sad day for us at 4th Estate and the world of literature in general. No one wrote like Joan: she was out there hunting down the truth in a style that was all her own. We will miss her voice that was fierce, curious, elegiac. She leaves behind an extraordinary body of work which has been an inspiration to many millions of readers around the world."

HarperCollins said it was "very sad" to hear of Didion's death. In a tribute, the publisher said: "Didion was one of the great chroniclers of American political and cultural life over the past half century. As Hilton Als notes in his introduction to essays collected in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, her most recent publication, 'the Didion gaze' brought a clarity of vision and insight that set her apart from other writers."

Her first collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968. Other works include The White Album (1979), Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Where I Was From (2003), South and West (2017) and the memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011). She is also the author of five novels: Run, River (1963), Play It as It Lays (1970), A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). 

The Year Of Magical Thinking, released in 2005, recounts the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and won a National Book Award that year. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Knopf quoted from the book in its tribute to her on Instagram: "We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

Shelley Wagner, her editor at Knopf, said Didion had been "a wise and subtle teller of truths". "We will mourn her death but celebrate her life, knowing that her work will inspire generations of readers and writers to come," Wagner said.

In 2013, Didion was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by then US President Barrack Obama, as well as a PEN lifetime Achievement Award.