Literary obituaries: March 19, 2026

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

• Teacher, writer, and activist Paula Doress-Worters, who detailed her experiences with postpartum depression in the groundbreaking book Our Bodies, Ourselves, died February 21 at age eighty-seven (The New York Times).

• Albert Zuckerman, a literary agent who represented such heavy hitters as Ken Follett, Stephen Hawking and Michael Lewis over his fifty-year career, and who also wrote the influential book Writing the Blockbuster Novel, died March 5 at age ninety-four (The New York Times).

• Peruvian novelist Alfredo Bryce Echenique, best known to the English-speaking world for A World for Julius, died March 10 at age eighty-seven (The New York Times).

• Margareta Magnusson, an artist and illustrator who found international fame by writing The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, died March 12 at age ninety-two (The Guardian).

• Paul R. Ehrlich, the ecologist and population scientist who also wrote the bestseller The Population Bomb, died March 13 at age ninety-three (The New York Times).

• Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher, intellectual, and author who popularized the idea of a "public sphere," died March 14 at age ninety-six (The New York Times).

• Len Deighton, whose novel The Ipcress File helped redefine the spy novel genre in the 1960s, died March 15 at age ninety-seven (The Guardian).