Renowned and provocative British writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens, has died after an 18-month battle against cancer. He was 62. Hitchens started his career in London but moved to the United States in 1981, enjoying great success on account of his elegant prose and outspoken views, accompanied by a swaggering demeanour.
Vanity Fair, for whom Hitchens worked for the past 19 years, said the writer died on Thursday from pneumonia, a complication of his cancer of the oesophagus, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, where friends were at his side. The magazine described him as an "incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant." "At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else, just as he had been for the last four decades," it said.