20 Famous Writers Who Died In 2025

Writers Write shares writing resources and writing trivia. In this post, we list 20 famous writers who died in 2025.

It’s the beginning of a new year, and it’s time to look back on the writers we lost last year. They were authors of children’s books and young adult novels, playwrights, authors of women’s fiction, thrillers, detective novels, science fiction, literary fiction, and even a Nobel Prize Laureate.

20 Famous Writers Who Died In 2025

1. Aidan Chambers was a British author of children’s and young-adult novels. He won the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2002.
2. Athol Fugard was a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director. He was well known for his political plays opposing apartheid, and for the 2005 Academy-Award winning film of his novel Tsotsi.
3. Dag Solstad was a Norwegian novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist. He wrote nearly 30 books.
4. David Lodge was an English author and literary critic. His novels often satirised academic life. Lodge also wrote television screenplays and three stage plays.
5. Edmund White was an American writer of novels, short fiction, and non-fiction. His work focused mainly on male homosexual society in America.
6. Frederick Forsyth was an English author of bestselling thrillers and an occasional political commentator. He combined meticulous research with suspenseful plots. Many of his novels were adapted for film and television.
7. Jean Van Leeuwen was an American children’s book author of over 40 children’s books.
8. Jennifer Johnston was an Irish novelist. She won a number of awards, including the Whitbread Book Award for The Old Jest and a Lifetime Achievement from the Irish Book Awards in 2012.
9. Joanna Trollope was the British author of many bestselling novels that were often called Aga Sagas. She was appointed OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
10. John Varley was an American science fiction writer who won Hugo and Nebula awards for his work.
11. Joseph Wambaugh was a bestselling American writer known for his fictional and non-fictional accounts of police work.
12. Ken Bruen was an Irish writer of hardboiled and noir crime fiction. He was known for his Jack Taylor series.
13. Kerry Greenwood was an Australian author. She wrote a string of historical detective novels centred on the character of Phryne Fisher.
14. Marina Lewycka was a British novelist of Ukrainian origin. Her debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was long-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and short-listed for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction.
15. Mario Vargas Llosa was was a Peruvian Spanish writer, and a leading figure in the Latin American boom of the 20th century. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.
16. Martin Cruz Smith was an American suspense and mystery novelist who was best known for his 11-book series featuring Arkady Renko.
17. Ngugi wa Thiong’o was a Kenyan author and academic, who has been described as East Africa’s leading novelist.
18. Sophie Kinsella was an English author, best known for writing the Shopaholic novels. She sold over 50 million copies of her books in more than 60 countries.
19. Tom Robbins was an American author whose novels were complex, satirical, and often obscure.
20. Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright. Knighted in 1997, his well-known plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Read:

1. 15 Famous Writers Who Died In 2023
2. 13 Famous Writers Who Died In 2022
3. 19 Famous Writers Who Died In 2021
4. 20 Famous Writers Who Died In 2020
5. 27 Famous Writers Who Died In 2019
6. 28 Famous Writers Who Died In 2018
7. 22 Famous Writers Who Died In 2017

by Amanda Patterson

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