Tributes paid to ‘a deeply original writer who used his own mortality as a lens’ and was still writing days before his death

Joe Hammond, the author who wrote movingly about his diagnosis with motor neurone disease (MND) and his own mortality, has died at the age of 50.

The British writer and playwright became famous in 2018 when he wrote for the Guardian about writing 33 cards for his two young sons, Tom and Jimmy, for the birthdays he would not live to see.

I'm writing 33 birthday cards for the sons I won't see grow up Read more

“In a year, or probably two, on a May or a November day, their mum will take an old shoebox from a drawer and pull out the first card from Dad. And then for every year until they’re 21,” he wrote in the article, which went viral.

“I had no previous facility for crying, no real experience of it, but after my diagnosis this is what I did for the next five nights and five days. In the evenings I built Lego and read stories. When Tom fell asleep, I began again. I’ve had conversations about the value of laughter but I no longer believe it is the best medicine. At the end of my five days of crying I felt calmer, more at ease and more content than at any time in my life. I know the glass is thickening and the figures in my life are blurring. I know this is happening and I know how it finishes. And I know that, despite all this, the end of my life is becoming the best of my life; not the worst.”

His memoir on his gradual physical deterioration, A Short History of Falling: Everything I Observed About Love Whilst Dying, was published this year. Starting: “If I could just stop falling over, this would be a funnier book,” the book was praised widely for its humour and calmness. In the Observer, Kate Kellaway wrote: “This is a book to extend empathy, to ensure one understands what it is to have MND and to witness one man facing it with exceptional courage.”

Days before his death, he finished writing an article about the end of his life, which will be published in Guardian Weekend magazine on 14 December.

His publisher HarperCollins announced his death, and said he had died peacefully at home on 30 November. He is survived by his wife Gill, and their two sons, seven-year-old Tom and three-year-old Jimmy.

Helen Garnons-Williams, his editor, described Hammond as a remarkable person. “It is our great honour – and pleasure – to have been his publisher,” she added. “His memoir is a lasting legacy: a book of consolation, wisdom, and – most astonishingly – wonder. Above all, it’s a celebration of love. Joe was hugely loved, and will be hugely missed.”

Will Francis, Hammond’s literary agent, said: “Joe’s mind only seemed to become sharper as his disease progressed ... I hope Gill, Tom and Jimmy will draw comfort from the book he left, which is full of both his wit and his love for them. He was a deeply original writer who used his own mortality as a lens, to see familiar things anew.”