Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, US. Besides novels, he wrote poetry, screenplays, essays, and translated from the French. Some of his best-known works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies(2005), Sunset Park (2010), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.
The search for identity and personal meaning was a common theme in Auster’s later publications, many of which concentrated heavily on the role of coincidence and random events and also the relationships between people and their environment. Auster’s heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else’s inscrutable schemes.
In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke and Blue in the Face. He has also translated Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Dupin, and Stéphane Mallarmé from the French.
On March 11, 2023, Auster’s wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, posted on Instagram that he had been diagnosed with cancer in the previous year. He died of complications of lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on April 30, 2024. He was 77.