Literary obituaries: October 17, 2025

Here are the literary deaths that either occurred recently or popped into the news recently, starting with the most distant.

• Journalist Ruth Weiss, who escaped Nazi Germany for apartheid South Africa as she chronicles in the memoir A Path Through Hard Grass: A Journalist’s Memories of Exile and Apartheid, died September 5 at age 101 (The New York Times).

• Philosopher and professor John R. Searle, whose work is the subject of at least fifteen books by other authors, died September 16 at age ninety-three (The New York Times).

• Susan Griffin, a poet, playwright, and author whose works included Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her and A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, died September 30 at age eighty-two (The New York Times).