Sunday Times journalist dies three weeks after saying he had been diagnosed with ‘an embarrassment of cancer – the full English’

AA Gill, the award-winning writer and provocative television and restaurant critic, has died at the age of 62, less than a month after revealing he was seriously ill with cancer.

The Sunday Times journalist, who was regarded by many on Fleet Street as one of the great newspaper stylists, opened his restaurant column three weeks ago with the abrupt declaration he was suffering with “an embarrassment of cancer”. He went on: “There is barely a morsel of offal that is not included. I have a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy.” He wanted readers to know, he said, in case it affected his judgments about food.

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In an interview in the news pages that day, Gill also said he regarded himself as having been lucky to have lived so long. He had recovered from a long and chaotic period of alcoholism at the age of 30 to become the devoted father of two twin children, Isaac and Edith, with his partner of almost 25 years, Nicola Formby, who was always referred to in his articles as “the Blonde”.

In the early 1990s Gill was married for five years to the current home secretary, Amber Rudd, the mother of his elder daughter Flora and elder son, Alasdair. Before that he had been married to Cressida Connolly, daughter of the writer Cyril Connolly. A former student at both Central St Martins and the Slade schools of art and design, in his 30s Gill moved away from a career in the visual arts towards a career in food writing, despite a lifelong struggle with dyslexia.



His death on Saturday morning was confirmed by the Sunday Times, for whom he was a longstanding columnist. Friends and colleagues on the newspaper were informed by editor Martin Ivens, who described the celebrated critic – known to some by his first name Adrian – as “a giant among journalists”.

In his memo to staff, Ivens said: “It is with profound sadness that I must tell you that our much-loved colleague Adrian Gill died this morning. Adrian was stoical about his illness, but the suddenness of his death has shocked us all.

“Characteristically, he has had the last word, writing an outstanding article about coming to terms with his cancer in tomorrow’s Sunday Times Magazine.

“He was the heart and soul of the paper. His wit was incomparable, his writing was dazzling and fearless, his intelligence was matched by compassion. Adrian was a giant among journalists. He was also our friend. We will miss him. I know you will want to join me in sending condolences to Nicola Formby and his children.”

Tim Shipman, political editor of the Sunday Times, wrote: “AA Gill, the writer who first made me buy the Sunday Times, the best of us for 30 years, has died. Very sombre mood in the office. If you loved AA Gill’s writing, he has one final, blisteringly brilliant cover story in tomorrow’s ST magazine. Be dazzled one last time.”

Frank Fitzgibbon, editor of the Sunday Times’ Irish edition, added: “Sunday Times announces death of Adrian (AA) Gill: Editor said he was ‘the heart and soul of the paper ... a giant among journalists’.”

Gill’s idiosyncratic writing style, frequent boasting, reverence for wealth and celebrity, and often offensive comments – not to mention his reportedly stratospheric salary – earned him equal parts opprobrium and adoration from fellow journalists, often at the same time. On learning of Gill’s death on Saturday, Robin Lustig, the broadcaster, tweeted: “Saddened to learn of the death of AA Gill, an outrageously talented writer with whom I almost never agreed.”

Jay Rayner, Gill’s fellow food critic at the Observer, said: “There were two Adrian Gills: the one you met on the page and the one you met in person. On the page he could be scabrous, virulent, an intense controversialist, and sometimes wilfully so. But he was brilliant at it.

“I tried not to read him because Gill, at his best, could make the rest of us feel like rank amateurs. He had been a restaurant cook and knew his subject inside out. He loved restaurants and wrote about them with a fierce engaging passion. In person, however, he was a sweet, kind and extremely charming man; one whose company others craved because a room with him in it was always more interesting.”



In a final piece written for his newspaper to be published on Sunday, Gill, who was born in Edinburgh in 1954 to English parents Michael Gill, a television producer, and Yvonne Gilan, an actress, wrote about his illness in a long piece of personal journalism – a farewell to his many admirers as well as to those who reacted in exasperation to his controversial left-baiting – he always referred to BBC executives as “Tristams”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest AA Gill on the front of Sunday Times magazine 11/12/16, to be published the day after his death. Photograph: © Sunday Times

His 2015 memoir, Pour Me, laid bare the story of his return from the brink of despair as an alcoholic. The book described his blackouts and the random nature of a life in which drink had prime importance. “Pockets were a constant source of surprise – a lamb chop, a votive candle, earrings, notes written on paper and ripped from books,” he wrote with typically bleak humour. “Morning pockets,” he continued, “were like tiny crime scenes.”

While the illness lost him friends and lovers, he was also nostalgic about the phase in which alcohol still seemed a positive influence, “an optimum inebriation, a time when it was all golden, when the drink and the pleasure made sense and were brilliant”.

Controversy swirled around even the sober Gill. He was vilified in 2012 for being rude about classicist Mary Beard and her television show. She was, he goaded, not good-looking enough for television. And in October 2009 he notoriously reported in his column that he had shot a baboon dead. He claimed he had known “perfectly well there [was] absolutely no excuse for [the shooting]”, yet he had killed the animal to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone”. The article was met with anger from animal rights groups.

