The American writer Annie Dillard, a major figure in nature literature and spiritual meditation, died on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, at the age of 81. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Her work was primarily published in France by Christian Bourgois, who translated a large part of her work. She died at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, writer Maggie Nelson, according to her family, cited by Associated Press. Born Meta Ann Doak on April 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she studied literature at Hollins College in Virginia, where she dedicated her thesis to Walden by Henry David Thoreau. The comparison with the great American transcendentalist writer would accompany her throughout her career, without exhausting a body of work in which scientific observation, theology, poetry, and reflection on the violence of the natural world continuously intersect. She was only 28 when Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published in 1974. Based on a year spent observing the surroundings of Tinker Creek, Virginia, Annie Dillard composed a text difficult to confine to a genre: nature narrative, philosophical essay, observational journal, and spiritual quest are all intertwined. The following year, the work received the Pulitzer Prize in the General Nonfiction category. However, Annie Dillard's nature is neither peaceful nor simply contemplative. Insects, birds, waterways, parasites, and predators become as many gateways to questions about beauty, cruelty, chance, or the existence of God. This way of bringing metaphysics to light through meticulous observation of reality became one of the signatures of her work. After this success, she continued a deliberately scattered body of work across genres: Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), An American Childhood (1987), The Writing Life (1989), the historical novel The Living (1992), For the Time Being (1999), or The Maytrees (2007). She also taught for more than twenty years at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In 2015, Barack Obama presented her with the National Humanities Medal awarded for the year 2014, recognizing her reflections on "human life and nature." Widely translated in France, Annie Dillard's works found a significant audience there. In France, it is mainly Christian Bourgois who has built, since the early 1990s, the reception of Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published in French in 1990, in a translation by Pierre Gault, before several reissues, including a new pocket edition in 2022. The same publisher also published An American Childhood, translated by Claude Grimal and Marie-Claude Chenour; Teaching a Stone to Talk, translated by Béatrice Durand; as well as The Living and For the Time Being, both translated by Brice Matthieussent. Au Present was translated by Sabine Porte, while her last novel, The Maytrees, published in French in 2008, was translated by Pierre-Yves Pétillon. Her first poetry collection, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, reached France in 2020 under the title Billets pour un moulin à prières, translated by Brice Matthieussent and published by Héros-Limite. With Teaching a Stone to Talk or For the Time Being, Annie Dillard also made the act of writing itself an object of examination. With her, observing, reading, and writing proceed from the same effort of attention: trying to grasp what in the ordinary world usually escapes the gaze.