Jane Gardam, author of books for adults and children including Old Filth and The Hollow Land, has died at the age of 96, her publisher has confirmed.
The Yorkshire-born novelist’s career spanned 50 years, and she was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2009. Her books were also nominated for the Booker prize, the Orange (now Women’s) prize and the Folio (now Writers’) prize. She remains the only person to have won the Whitbread prize (latterly the Costa) in two categories: she won the children’s book category in 1981 for The Hollow Land and the best novel category in 1991 for The Queen of the Tambourine. Old Filth was named as one of the BBC’s 100 greatest British novels in 2015.
Gardam was much admired by fellow authors, with Ian McEwan calling her “a treasure of English contemporary writing”. Describing Old Filth when it came out in 2004, fellow novelist Maggie Gee said Gardam’s writing “crackles with energy, variety, sensuous richness. It is the writing of a 25-year-old with the wisdom and subtlety of a razor-sharp 100-year-old.”
Born in 1928, Gardam was raised in the seaside Yorkshire town of Redcar by a maths teacher father and a stay-at-home mother who was passionate about writing. “She wrote all the time, endlessly. She’d just say to any child in the street, excuse me, could you just take this letter to the post. And she was always writing sermons,” Gardam told the Guardian in a 2005 interview.
Her 1985 novel Crusoe’s Daughter, about an isolated woman who is obsessed with books, specifically Robinson Crusoe, was partly inspired by Gardam’s mother, she said. It “has a lot to do with a girl not being educated, when if she had been a boy the money would have been found”.
After the second world war, Gardam moved to London for the education her mother never had, attending Bedford College (part of London University). After completing her degree in English, she had a number of book-related jobs, including a stint as a Red Cross travelling librarian, and then a career as a journalist, first as a subeditor on the Weldon’s Ladies’ Journal and then as assistant literary editor at Time and Tide.
She married a barrister, David Gardam, whose career partially inspired her most famous novel, Old Filth, a tragicomedy about a retired judge grieving his wife. The couple had three children, and it was only when the youngest had started school that she began her first book. “I think I would have died if it hadn’t been published,” she said in a 2011 Guardian interview. “I was desperate to get started – I was possessed.”
Gardam and her husband moved to Sandwich in 1987, where she remained after his death in 2010, before moving to Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire in her final years. Her last book was Last Friends, published in 2013 and shortlisted for the 2014 Folio prize. The finale to a trilogy that began with Old Filth and continued with The Man in the Wooden Hat, Last Friends was described as “exuberant and funny and dizzy and a little bit frightening” by Guardian reviewer Tessa Hadley.
Gardam was one of the first novelists published by Abacus, an imprint of Little, Brown. Richard Beswick, Jane’s publisher, said the novelist was “hugely loved by us all. Her warmth, humour and wisdom are quite irreplaceable.”
“I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed,” Gardam told the Telegraph in 2013. “I don’t think my style has changed very much at all – though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It’s about getting to know a character and loving them, I think.”
