Very sad to learn of the death of the author Paul Auster at the age of 77. We met and corresponded often in the 1980s and 1990s and discussed collaborating on an opera. This never happened, but I set two of his poems in 1990, which is, I think, the date of these photographs, taken at his writing retreat in Vermont. I read with much pleasure his most recent book, Baumgartner, last summer : I know how ill he had been recently so there cannot be much hope of another. What a wonderful writer he was.