Book News
US author and activist Susan Sontag dies
Wednesday 29 December 2004
Sontag, who had been battling leukaemia, died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in the city where she was born.
She was renowned as a human rights activist, as well as the author of 17 books, covering subjects from pornography to science fiction films. Her works have been translated into 30 languages.
Sontag received the American National Book Award in 2000 for her historical novel entitled 'In America'.
She was also widely recognised for her work as an essayist, in particular for her 1964 essay 'Notes on Camp', a study of homosexual aesthetics.
Sontag, who described herself as a "zealot of seriousness", also led many human rights campaigns, particularly on behalf of imprisoned writers.
Fellow author Salman Rushdie described her as "a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth".
Sontag recently fuelled criticism when she described 11 September as "an act undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions".
In 1993 she took a production of Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' to the besieged Sarajevo.
Sontag married academic Philip Rieff when she was 17. The couple had a son in 1952.
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