British author John le Carr dies at 89

Famous British spy writer John le Carré died on Saturday at
the age of 89, his family confirmed on Sunday.

Le Carré died of pneumonia at the Royal Cornwall Hospital.
He is survived by his four sons and wife Jane.

“It is with great sadness that I must share the news
that David Cornwell, known to the world as John Le Carre, passed away after a
short illness (not Covid-19 related) in Cornwall on Saturday evening,”
said Jonny Geller, chief executive of The Curtis Brown Group in a statement
shared on Twitter.

“John Le Carré was an undisputed giant of English
literature. He defined the Cold War era and fearlessly spoke truth to power in
the decades that followed,” the agent wrote.

Born in 1931 as David Cornwall, le Carré began his writing
career while still working at the British Foreign Service, which he joined in
the 1940s after leaving his job as a teacher at Eton.

Le Carré was given a rare insight into the warp of weft of
the abstruse spy world, while working at the secret service where he ran and
recruited spies, many of them himself, operating from the MI5 office in London.

He wrote his first novel ‘Call for the Dead’ in 1961,
introducing the famous character George Smiley, which went on to become his
more durable creations appearing in 10 novels.

Le Carré’s star shone with his breakout novel ‘The Spy Who
Came in From the Cold’ in 1963, which became an international bestseller. The
novel which had Smiley appearing in it briefly detailed the racy exploits of a
British agent who crosses over to the East German spy agency as a faux-defector
sowing doubts about their own intelligence officer.

‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ (1974), ‘Night Manager’ (1993), ‘Tailor of Panama’ (1996), and ‘The Constant Gardener’ (2001), are some of his
other celebrated works.

 Le Carré won several
awards during his career, including a Somerset Maugham Award in 1964 and a number
of honorary doctorates, among them one by the Oxford University.

Le Carré’s last novel, “Agent Running in the
Field”, was published in October 2019.

The novelist Robert Harris called le Carré “one of
those writers who really was not only a brilliant writer but he also penetrated
popular culture — and that’s a great rarity” AFP reported.

Harris told Sky News television le Carré was a
“brilliant novelist” and said “The Spy Who Came In From The
Cold” was a “masterpiece”.

Salman Rushdie, another giant of English letters, paid his
tribute to the prolific novelist, calling his novel ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’
a “masterpiece”. He admitted that le Carré was one of the “greatest” writers of the 20th
century.

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a masterpiece,” Rushdie
said in a tweet, remembering the novelist with whom he had engaged in a feud in
the late 1990s over the ‘Satanic Verses’ ban and the consequent controversy
including ‘fatwa’ issued by the Iranian authorities.