The literary world has suffered a great loss with the passing of one of the world’s most famous and celebrated authors, John Updike. Winning just about every literary prize available, Updike was most known for his Rabbit novels, two of which won the Pulitzer prize for fiction, and The Witches of Eastwick. Also known for his depiction of sex, Updike won a lifetime achievement award in November 2008 at the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award, which celebrates "crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature".

A prolific writer, penning more than 50 books over the span of his career, John Updike will continue to live on through his novels, short stories, poems and his memoir, Self-Consciousness, which Martin Amis described a section as being “to my knowledge the best thing yet written on what it is like to get old: age, and the only end of age”.

It truly is the end of an age, as well as an era. Happily, we have been given one more gift from Mr. Updike, a book of short fiction, "My Father's Tears and Other Stories," is scheduled to come out later this year.