Larger than life: Remembering the people we lost in the 2010s

The leading lights in their fields, these figures had an impact that will reverberate for a long time

Clockwise from top left: Bowie, Morrison, Ali, Castro, Mandela and Hawking (AFP/Getty)

The 2010s was the decade we said farewell to some of the largest characters on the world stage, figures such as Nelson Mandela, who did more than anyone to transform the political landscape of South Africa and the wider region; Stephen Hawking, the cosmologist who revolutionised our understanding of the universe; David Bowie, whose aesthetic vision has arguably shaped modern-day culture more than any other individual; and Toni Morrison, whose fiction about America’s shameful history of racism shook up the literary canon.

Here is our selection, culled from the obituary pages of The Independent, of those who left us in the past decade but whose influence will live on.