Memorial Page for Leonard Cohen (née Leonard Norman Cohen)

Leonard Cohen (born 21 September 1934 in Montreal, Canada; died 7 November 2016 in Los Angeles) was a Canadian poet, novelist and singer. With his deep voice, spoken almost as much as sung in his later years, and songs such as Suzanne, Bird on the Wire and Hallelujah, he became one of the most influential songwriters of the second half of the 20th century – an artist whose work moved across six decades between poetry, the novel, music and spiritual searching.

A poet before a singer

Cohen was born into a wealthy, influential Jewish family in Westmount, a suburb of Montreal; his great-grandfather had emigrated from Lithuania and helped shape the city's Jewish community. Long before he was known as a musician, Cohen was a writer: his first poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956 in a print run of 500 copies, followed in 1961 by The Spice-Box of Earth, which made him known chiefly within Canada. In 1963 he published the novel The Favourite Game, and in 1966 the controversially discussed Beautiful Losers.

Hydra and the turn to music

From 1960 to 1967 Cohen lived at times on the Greek island of Hydra, where he spent several years with the Norwegian Marianne Ihlen, who became his muse and to whom he later dedicated songs such as So Long, Marianne and Bird on the Wire. In the mid-1960s Cohen decided to become a songwriter. Back in New York, he was discovered by John Hammond, the producer at Columbia Records; his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released in late 1967 and included Suzanne, a song folk singer Judy Collins had already made known. The album became a major success in the folk and songwriter scene; Songs from a Room, featuring Bird on the Wire, followed in 1969, and Songs of Love and Hate in 1971.

Retreat to a Zen monastery

In 1994 Cohen withdrew for several years to the Buddhist Mount Baldy Zen Center in the mountains near Los Angeles, working there as a cook and driver for his teacher, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, and was ordained a Zen monk in 1996 under the name Jikan – "silence." He did not leave the monastery again until 1999.

Financial loss and comeback

In the mid-2000s it emerged that Cohen's longtime manager, Kelley Lynch, had misappropriated nearly all of his multi-million-dollar retirement savings. This financial loss is regarded as the principal reason Cohen embarked, late in life, on a major stage career once again: on 11 May 2008 he opened his first extensive world tour in 15 years in Fredericton, New Brunswick, a tour that continued until 2013 and brought him back to stages around the world.

You Want It Darker and death

On 21 October 2016, You Want It Darker was released, Cohen's seventeenth and final studio album, which reached the top of the charts in several countries, including Canada and Austria. Just seventeen days later, on 7 November 2016, Leonard Cohen died aged 82 at his home in Los Angeles; the cause was complications from leukaemia combined with a fall.

Cohen was buried in his hometown of Montreal, near the cemetery where generations of his family already rested. His body of work — from the early poetry collections through the melancholy albums of the late 1960s to the dark, age-wise final recordings — remains among the most literary in popular music: a life's work that treated doubt, desire, faith and loss with equal seriousness.