You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Tributes have been paid to author Al Alvarez, who has died aged 90.
Born in London in 1929, Alvarez was a poet, novelist, essayist, literary critic, anthologist and self-confessed adrenaline junkie, whose writing life spanned six decades. At the age of 28, he was the youngest person ever chosen by Princeton University to deliver the Christian Gauss lectures, Bloomsbury said. He served as poetry critic and editor for the Observer from 1956 until 1966, where he was an early advocate of the poetry of Sylvia Plath, who was a close friend.
Bloomsbury "was hugely proud to be his publisher in the last decades of his life", bringing back into print much of his backlist and publishing his autobiography, Where Did it All Go Right?, Poker - which apparently inspired the Bloomsbury design department to take up playing poker in their lunch hours - as well as two collections of essays, The Writer’s Voice and Risky Business, and his "beautiful" final book, Pondlife, a meditation on swimming in the Hampstead ponds and on growing old.
Bloomsbury editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle said: “Al Alvarez was a writer and friend like no other. He was one of the cleverest, wickedest, funniest, warmest and frankly most attractive men I have ever met. The world will be a much duller place without him. I will miss him immensely.”
Clare Alexander, Alvarez’s agent at Aitken Alexander Associates, said: “Al Alvarez was unique, a man who considered himself an outsider and yet who challenged and changed the way people think about so many things – about poetry, suicide, art, poker, climbing and swimming, about life itself. He was a truly irreplaceable true man of letters, who never regarded himself as part of the literary world and yet whose impact on that world will continue to reverberate through time. He will be hugely missed and was greatly loved.”
Alvarez is survived by his wife, Anne, and their children Luke and Kate, as well as his four grandchildren.