‘Geek Love’ Author Katherine Dunn Dead At 70

Photo Courtesy: UPI.com

PORTLAND, Ore., May 13 (UPI) — Katherine Dunn, the author best known for the carnival novel “Geek Love,” has died. She was 70 years old.

Dunn died Thursday from complications from lung cancer at her home in Portland, Ore., her son Eli Dapolonia told the local weekly newspaper, Wilamette Week.

“Geek Love” was published in 1989 and subsequently became a cult classic. In the same year, the novel became a finalist for the National Book Award.

Dunn was born in 1945 in Garden City, Kansas, the fourth of five children. She wrote her first two books, “Attic” and “Truck,” during her travels in Europe. She returned to Oregon in the 1970s.

A trained boxer, Dunn also penned “One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing” and the award-winning “School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America’s Toughest Boxing Gyms.”

Throughout her career, Dunn worked as a newspaper journalist, for The Oregonian, Willamette Week, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and also wrote for Vogue and Playboy.

She is survived by her husband of four years, Paul Pomerantz, and by her son, Eli Dapolonia.

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