NEW DELHI: French author Dominique Lapierre, bestselling creator of the ode to Kolkata, ‘Metropolis of Pleasure’, who additionally collaborated with American Larry Collins to jot down six books that bought greater than 50 million copies in over 30 languages, has died.”At 91, he died of outdated age,” the creator’s spouse Dominique Conchon-Lapierre was quoted as saying by the French newspaper ‘Var-Matin’ on Sunday.Lapierre, who spoke Bengali fluently and was conferred the Padma Bhushan in 2008, based the Metropolis of Pleasure Basis to rescue kids affected by leprosy from the slums of Kolkata.
Arrange in 1981, it was supported by the royalties from his many literary successes.Lapierre was born on July 30, 1931, in Chatelaillon (France), to a diplomat father and a journalist mom.
As a 17-year-old, he left Paris with $30 and labored aboard a ship.
Disembarking within the US, he managed a 30,000-mile jaunt round North America.This journey led to Lapierre’s first bestselling ebook, ‘A Greenback for a Thousand Miles’.
He woild spend the remainder of his life trying to find tales in several elements of the world.
Whereas finishing navy service in 1954, he met Collins, then serving within the US military .The duo first collaborated on the runaway hit ‘Is Paris Burning?’ — a non-fiction work printed in 1965 that chronicled the occasions main as much as August 1944, when Nazi Germany surrendered management of the French capital.
It was tailored for the silver display by Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal.They adopted its success with extra extremely researched dramatisations of historic occasions, such because the creation of Israel (‘O Jerusalem’, 1972) and ‘Freedom at Midnight’ (1975) — largely thought of a transferring and seminal account of the partition of India.Additionally they co-wrote ‘Or I am going to Costume You in Mourning’, a biography of Spanish bullfighter El Cordobes, and two fiction thrillers about terrorist plans to destroy New York — ‘The Fifth Horseman’ in 1980 and ‘Is New York Burning?’ in 2004.Lapierre’s 1985 ebook ‘Metropolis of Pleasure’ — concerning the hardships of a rickshaw puller in Kolkata — was additionally an enormous success.
A film based mostly on it was launched in 1992, starring Patrick Swayze and directed by Roland Joffe.In 1991, Lapierre printed ‘Past Love’, the story of the invention of the AIDS virus.
Amongst his later works, ‘A Thousand Suns’ chronicled the heroes and occasions that formed the lifetime of the author-philanthropist whereas ‘India mon amour’, his memoir, mirrored his love for India.
When he visited Mom Teresa in Kolkata within the early Nineteen Eighties, he introduced her with $50,000, admitting it was “solely a drop within the ocean of want”.
She reportedly replied: “If this drop didn’t exist, even the ocean wouldn’t”.In 2005, Lapierre stated that due to his funding of humanitarian work, in addition to donations from readers, it grew to become “doable to treatment 1,000,000 tuberculosis sufferers in 24 years (and) to look after 9,000 kids with leprosy”..
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