Gilbert Adair

Gilbert Adair (29 December 1944 – 8 December 2011) was a Scottish poet, novelist, film critic and journalist.

Life
Adair was born in Edinburgh, but from 1968 to 1980 he lived in Paris, France. His early works of fiction included Alice Through the Needle's Eye (following Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass) and Peter Pan and the Only Children (following Peter and Wendy). He won the Author's Club First Novel Award in 1988 for his novel The Holy Innocents. From 1992 to 1996 he wrote the "Scrutiny" column for The Sunday Times. During 1998 and 1999 he was the chief film critic of The Independent on Sunday, where in 1999 he also wrote a year-long column called "The Guillotine".

His works are compared to those of Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt and Patrick Gale. His book Flickers: A History of the Cinema in 100 Images was admired by David Foster Wallace.

The film Love and Death on Long Island (1997), directed by Richard Kwietniowski, was based on his 1990 novel of the same name. The film The Dreamers (2003) directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, with a script by Adair, was based on his book The Holy Innocents, which Adair revised and re-released under the same title as the film.

Adair himself was homosexual, though he rarely talked about the matter, not wishing to be labelled. "Obviously there are gay themes in a lot of my novels," he said in a recent interview, "but I really wouldn't be happy to be thought of as a 'Gay Writer' ... Being gay hasn't defined my life." At the end of his life, he lived in London, England. Adair died from a brain haemorrhage, 13 months after suffering a stroke which blinded him. He was writing a stage version of Love and Death on Long Island, which is being developed by producers New Gods and Heroes, at the time of his death.

Recognition
He was critically most famous for the "fiendish" translation of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used, but was more widely known for the films adapted from his novels, including Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and the The Dreamers (2003).

In 1995 he won the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for his book A Void, which is a translation of the French book La Disparition by Georges Perec.

Fiction

 * Alice through the Needle's Eye (1984)
 * Peter Pan and the Only Children (1987)
 * The Holy Innocents (1988) - winner of the Author's Club First Novel Award
 * Love and Death on Long Island (1990)
 * The Death of the Author (1992) - a black satire of contemporary theoretical cultishness and a metaphysical murder mystery
 * The Key of the Tower (1997)
 * A Closed Book (1999) - a literary thriller about a prize-winning novelist left blind after a serious car accident.
 * The Dreamers (2003) - a tale of sexual obsession set against the backdrop of the Paris street riots of 1968
 * Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires (2003) - the story of Gideon, a young Englishman in 1980s Paris, on the verge of sexual discovery
 * The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006) - a murder mystery set in the 1930s on Dartmoor, first in the Evadne Mount trilogy
 * A Mysterious Affair of Style (2007) - second in the Evadne Mount trilogy
 * And Then There Was No One (2009) - third in the Evadne Mount trilogy

Non-fiction

 * A Night at the Pictures (with Nick Roddick) (1985)
 * Myths & Memories (1986)
 * Hollywood's Vietnam (1981)
 * The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice (1992)
 * Wonder Tales: Six French Stories of Enchantment (editor with Marina Warner) (1995)
 * Flickers (1995)
 * Surfing the Zeitgeist (1997)
 * Movies (editor) (1999)
 * The Real Tadzio (2001) - a biography of the boy (Baron Władysław Moes) who inspired Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.

Translated

 * Letters by François Truffaut (1990) (also editor)
 * A Void by Georges Perec (1994) — winner of the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize
 * Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau (2000) (introduction)