Kate Saunders, an award-winning author, journalist and critic who achieved much despite a life of pain and loss, has passed away at the age of 62.

Originally an actress, Kate joined the National Theater in 1987, an experience that inspired her second novel Castlestorm (1989) and her third crime novel The Sad Maid (2021). In 1982, Rodney Trotter dated her on an episode of Only Fools and Horses, where she also appeared as a police officer. Yet steeped in Victorian and Edwardian classics from an early age, she soon realized that her true calling was writing, and the 26-year-old is credited with her first novel, The Prodigal Father (1986). ) won the Betty Trask Award. As she always said, “For an actor, I am ordinary, but for a writer, I am beautiful.”

This was the start of his career, and he wrote more than 20 novels for adults and children, in genres ranging from historical romances to detective novels to children’s books. A columnist for The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Express, She and The Cosmopolitan, she reviewed the 1990 Booker Prize and convinced the other judges to choose AS Byatt’s Possession” is the winner. She also served as a judge for the 2007 Women’s Award, which was won by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half a Yellow Sun that same year.

The eldest of six children, Kate was born into a devout English Catholic family in London with bohemian charm, warmth and eccentricity. Her father, Basil Saunders, was an early public relations advocate, and her mother, Betty (née Smith) was a reporter for The Church Times. Their home on Park Avenue in Dartmouth is so untidy that Kate said: “If it weren’t for the middle class, we might have been detained”. Both she and her siblings avoided college because of their professions, primarily journalism or publishing. Kate was educated at Camden Girls’ School and trained with the Anna Shell Theater Company.