Jane Gardam: Award-winning Yorkshire born writer dies aged 96

Her first book for adults, Black Faces, White Faces in 1975, a collection of linked short stories about Jamaica, won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Subsequent collections of short stories included The Pangs of Love and Other Stories, Going into a Dark House and Missing the Midnight: Hauntings & Grotesques.

God on the Rocks, her first novel for adults in 1978, which was a coming-of-age story set in the 1930s, was adapted for television in 1992. Her other novels include The Queen of the Tambourine and The Flight of the Maidens, which tells the stories of three Yorkshire schoolgirls on the brink of university, just after the war.

Her non-fiction includes a book about the Yorkshire of her childhood in The Iron Coast.

For children, she wrote Bilgewater in 1977, and won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award for The Hollow Land, four years later.

Ms Gardam was born Jean Pearson in Coatham, near Redcar in the old North Riding, and grew up there and in Cumberland. At school, she was inspired by the Osiris Players, Britain’s first all-female professional theatre company whose production of She Stoops to Conquer transfixed her.

At 17 she won a scholarship to read English at Bedford College, London, a period that was followed by work as a Red Cross travelling hospital librarian and later as a journalist.

Her first book, the children’s novel A Long Way From Verona, was published in 1971 and won the retrospective Phoenix Award from the Children’s Literature Association 20 years later.

Her last works of fiction included the Old Filth trilogy, which explored the ravages and embarrassments of old age.

She was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and received an OBE in 2009.

She married David Gardam QC in 1954 and they had three children, one of whom, Kitty, predeceased her. David died in 2010.