Literature is, first of all, an essential form of nourishment to consciousness. It plays a vital role in the creation of inwardness and the enlarging and deepening of our sympathies and our sensitivities --- to other human beings, and to language.

Susan Sontag (New York, 1933) has Arts degrees from the universities of Chicago and Harvard. She published her first novel, "The Benefactor", in 1963, followed shortly after by "Against Interpretation" (1966). She was posted to Vietnam as a war correspondent in 1968, and was profoundly affected by the conflict. She has a long-standing interest in the cinema, and travelled to Sweden, where she made "Duet for Cannibals" (1969) and "Brother Carl" (1971), whilst also writing such books as "Trip to Hanoi" (1968) and "Styles of Radical Will" (1969).

She wrote "Under the Sign of Saturn" in 1972 (it was published in 1980), and filmed the Israeli troops during the Middle East War, directing a film called "Promised Lands" in The Golan Heights. She wrote "Illness as Metaphor", whilst ill from cancer, and published "AIDS and its Metaphors" in 1989. She has written on the cinema and theatre and has edited selected texts of Roland Barthes and Antonin Artaud. "The Volcano Lover" came out in 1992, and she travelled to Sarajevo the following year to give class at the Academy of Drama and to stage "Waiting for Godot" (in collaboration with other intellectuals). Her novel "In America" (1999) has been granted the National Book Award in USA and the Jerusalem Prize.

In 1993 she co-founded the International Parliament of Writers, and in 1994 she received the Montblanc Prize for her cultural work in Bosnia.

Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.


(Note: Susan Sontag photograph by Annie Leibovitz)