Australian author Inga Clendinnen, "a brilliant historian and an extraordinary writer" who was "fearless and endlessly curious," died September 8, her publisher, Text Publishing, noted in a remembrance. She was 82. "An internationally acclaimed historian of Aztec and Mayan culture and society, Inga came to Text when a different phase of her life had begun after her liver transplant in 1994 when she was 60," Text noted. "Her new liver not only saved her life, it unleashed her writing. Australian literature owes a debt to her surgeons because their skill allowed Inga to spread her wings. Illness, she said, made her a writer."
Clendinnen's books include Aztecs: An Interpretation; Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570; Reading the Holocaust; Tiger's Eye: A Memoir; Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact; and Agamemnon's Kiss.