Nina Bawden, whose classic children's novel Carrie's War drew from her own evacuation during the second world war, has died aged 87.
The much-loved author of more than 40 novels, more than half of which were for adults, Bawden passed away at home in north London this morning, her publisher Virago said. Lennie Goodings, who edited Bawden's adult novels at Virago, said that the author was writing "to the end", finishing a piece on growing up in the 1940s with the help of her son Robert Bawden "just days before she died".
Bawden is best known for two children's novels, the 1973 title Carrie's War, in which two children are evacuated to a Welsh village, and The Peppermint Pig, a story first published in 1975 which told of the naughty runt of a litter of pigs. Described by the novelist PD James as "among the most perceptive and accomplished novelists writing today", she was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1987 for Circles of Deceit, and for the Lost Booker of 1970 for The Birds on the Trees, also receiving the PEN Award for a Lifetime's Service to Literature in 2004.
Goodings called Bawden "a wonderful storyteller", who made "powerful and extraordinarily acute observations about what makes us human" in her short novels. "She was very wise, fiercely gentle, very funny and irreverent," she said.
"There were so many people who were brought up on her children's books, and then graduated to her older novels, going on to read her books to their own kids as well," said Goodings. "I think she was especially good at what goes on behind the facade of good behaviour. And she was a great observer as well, possibly from being evacuated as a child."
Julia Eccleshare, the Guardian's children's editor, praised Bawden's "natural gift for storytelling, which combined with a rare understanding of the very particular way in which children see the world." Eccleshare, who wrote the introduction for the latest edition of Carrie's War, said Bawden was "rightly best-known" for the novel, "which remains strangely timeless while also standing as one of the most sensitive and revealing accounts of the bewildering experiences and the complex emotions surrounding them experienced by children evacuated during the second world war."
Fellow writers were also quick to pay tribute. Speaking from the Edinburgh International Book festival, the children's author Eleanor Updale said of Bawden that "she wrote without patronising or hectoring, treating her readers as clever people who demanded, and deserved, the best."
One of Bawden's final books, Dear Austen, was a memoir telling of her experiences during and after the Potters Bar rail crash in May 2002, which killed her husband Austen Kark and seriously injured her. Her experiences were also documented by the David Hare play The Permanent Way, about the privatisation of the British railways, in which she was portrayed as a character. She had three children, two of whom pre-deceased her.
