The French writer Dominique Lapierre, author of several best sellers, has died at the age of 91, as confirmed by his wife Aliette Spitzer to the French media. The death occurred last Friday in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, where the writer lived, in the town of Ramatuelle.
One of his best-known works was The City of Joy, written in 1982, and its success was such that it was adopted into the cinema ten years later. The book tells the story of the inhabitants of a shantytown in Calcutta, where the Frenchman spent two years investigating and living with the neighbors. His life stage in India led him to create, together with his wife, and the support of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a humanitarian foundation against poverty in the country and, especially, to help sick children with leprosy.
Lapierre, born in Paris in 1931, began his writing career in the late 1950s by co-writing several books with his friend Larry Collins such as Is Paris Burning? and Oh, Jerusalem. In addition, between 1954 and 1967 he worked as a reporter for Paris Match magazine. Lapierre and Collins met in Guatemala, a country where he had gone to cover the so-called October Revolution of 1944.
Another of his successes was obtained together with Javier Moro with whom he published It was midnight in Bhopal (2001) about the toxic gas leak from a North American factory built in the Indian city of Bhopal, which caused 30,000 deaths and five hundred thousand injuries.
Lapierre and his wife founded Action pour les Enfants des Lépreux de Calcutta in 1982, which finances numerous education and health programs, and builds hundreds of drinking water wells with the sale of their books. He also allows the financial independence of thousands of women thanks to micro-credits and maintains four hospital ships that sail to help the isolated populations of fifty islands of the Ganges Delta.
For this humanitarian work and for his books on the history of the Indian subcontinent, Dominique Lapierre received, on May 5, 2008, from the President of India, the highest civil award, the Padma Bhushan
