My father, Bob Biderman, who has died aged 77, was a writer, publisher and activist. He was one of the first Americans to refuse to fight in Vietnam, an experience that became the basis for his first novel, Letters to Nanette (1982). After moving to the UK he wrote mysteries and thrillers, one of which, The Genesis Files, was listed as one of the top 10 crime novels of 1988 by the Guardian. The main character, Joseph Radkin, would feature in five books.

Born to Jewish communist parents, Fannie (nee Kuller), an artist, and Abraham (Ed) Biderman, a union organiser, Bob’s early youth was spent in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he went to Walnut Hills high school. As the McCarthy era escalated, Ed was forced underground and Fannie and the children resettled in Los Angeles for a few years, where Bob attended Fairfax high school. The family was eventually reunited, and Bob subsequently fictionalised these events in his book Red Dreams (2004).

He went to UC Berkeley in 1960 to study medicine, but dropped out after two years to travel around Europe. While there, he was drafted into the US military. He spent nearly two years as an army medic before refusing to go to Vietnam in 1965. He joined the antiwar movement, and went to San Francisco State University to study English literature, where he met fellow student Joy Magezis.

In 1968 they participated in the longest-running student strike in US history. Bob graduated in 1969 and the following year he and Joy married. During the mid-1970s they performed political puppet shows across the US and founded the magazine Puppetry in Education News, which they ran until 1980.

After Letters to Nanette gained a wider readership in the UK, Bob and Joy moved to Cambridge. Bob wrote full-time for most of the 80s, then taught English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at the College of North West London (1990–2005), and ran ESOL magazine (1995-2003), publishing stories and poetry he had inspired his students to write.

Out of a love of cafes and their history as places that, as Bob said, “fired the flames of dissent”, he started the website Café Magazine in 1994. This culminated in the book A People’s History of Coffee and Cafes (2013). In 1996 Bob had started Black Apollo Press with two friends, David Kelley and David Cutting. They published books on topics stretching from political freedoms in the media to the dialogue between painting and poetry.

Last March, Bob was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. On receiving the news he booked a holiday with Joy to Amsterdam. His memoir, Construction/Deconstruction: Artist as Oppositionist, was published last year.

Bob is survived by Joy, his children, Kerin and me, his grandchildren, Sophie and Ella, and his brother, Barry.