Gilbert Adair

Gilbert Adair (December 29, 1944 – December 8, 2011) was the Scottish writer of 1987's Peter Pan and the Only Children, one of the first (unauthorised) sequels written to J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy. He was a noted novelist, screenwriter, and film critic.

Adair was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He died in London from a brain hemorrhage, a year after suffering a stroke (which had blinded him).

His first novel, published three years before Only Children, was a similar project: Alice through the Needle's Eye, a sequel to the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

The film Love and Death on Long Island by Richard Kwietniowski, starring John Hurt and Jason Priestley, was based on Adair's 1990 novel. He was adapting it for the stage at the time of his death. Bernardo Bertolucci's scandalously erotic film The Dreamers was scripted by Adair, based on his 1988 book The Holy Innocents, for which he won the Author's Club First Novel Award.

From 1992 to 1996 he wrote the "Scrutiny" column for London's The Sunday Times. During 1998 and 1999 he was the chief film critic of The Independent on Sunday, where in 1999 he also wrote a year-long column called "The Guillotine". He wrote several non-fiction books, mostly related to cinema.

His screenwriting career included collaborations with Raúl Ruiz on the The Territory (1981), Klimt (2006) starring John Malkovich, and Blind Revenge (aka A Closed Book) (2010) starring Tom Conti and Daryl Hannah.

He won the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for his book A Void, which is a translation of the French book La Disparition by Georges Perec. The original book contains no instances of the letter e except in essential words such as je (I) and le (the), which is a feat in itself; Adair managed to translate it with the same limitation (allowing only me and the).