My friend Anita Mason, who has died aged 78, was the author of eight novels, one of which, The Illusionist, made it on to the 1983 Booker shortlist. Anita never made much money out of her writing but she considered herself fortunate to be following her passion. While her novels employed a wide range of historical and geographical settings (from first century Judea to the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas and Nazi Germany) her themes remained constant: characters on the margins who resist unequal divisions of powers.
She was born in Bristol, the only child of Beryl and Roy Mason. Her father was a craftsman in an aircraft engine factory. After leaving Redmaids’ high school in Bristol, Anita went to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, to study English, graduating in 1963.
She worked for a medical publishing journal before spending some years helping to run an organic smallholding in Cornwall and then writing for a local newspaper in Truro. Her first novel, Bethany, was published in 1981 while she was still living in Cornwall, and her second, The Illusionist, came out in 1983. In 1984 she took up a residency at Trinity College, Leeds, where she remained, writing and teaching in adult education for the next few years.
Six further novels followed: The War Against Chaos (1988); The Racket (1990), which was shortlisted for the Fawcett prize in 1990; Angel (1994); The Yellow Cathedral (2002); Perfection (2003); and The Right Hand of the Sun (2008).
From 1999 onwards she became a recipient of various Royal Literary Fund fellowships, which financed postings to Bath Spa University, Frome libraries, Somerset, and Warwick University, at each of which she could pursue her writing while providing mentoring for students. Following her fellowship at Warwick she was invited to teach on the creative writing master’s degree course there (2007-09). She relished the challenge and the intellectual stimulation of her students.
I met Anita at Bath Spa University, where I was teaching, and I vividly remember seeing her give a reading there from The Right Hand of the Sun. She was boyish in appearance, agile and intense, and as she walked up the aisle a hush fell on the audience. Once she began reading you knew that every word counted. There was a tingle of excitement, knowing that you were in the presence of a rare talent.
From 2003 Anita lived in Bristol, in a flat full of books and the art work she had collected from her travels in Latin America. She was a fine cook, an inveterate walker and someone who enjoyed the natural world almost as much as the city. Over the 20 years of our close companionship, she and I took research trips and many enjoyable working holidays together, often in the New Forest.
Even when polymyositis was taking its toll on her energy over the past couple of years she was still writing, and she regularly updated a trenchant and spirited weekly anti-Brexit blog up to the end of 2018.
