Peter Rushforth

Prize-winning author of 'Kindergarten'

Death rarely seems timely, but the sudden death of the novelist Peter Rushforth, while walking on the Yorkshire Moors, is peculiarly unkind. It came when Rushforth's life as a writer was blossoming. He was due at the Vancouver International Writers' Festival this week, a year after publication of his second novel, Pinkerton's Sister, with its successor, A Dead Language, due out next spring.

Pinkerton's Sister appeared 25 years after his first, Kindergarten, had won the Hawthornden Prize. The long gap was due to Rushforth's struggle to combine the writing he loved with the job he enjoyed, as Head of English at Friends' School in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire.

Peter Scott Rushforth was born in 1945 in County Durham but brought up in Leeds, where he went to Cockburn High School; he then took an English degree at Hull University. After a Dip Ed at Nottingham University, he taught for four years at Huddersfield New College before taking up the post at Friends' School. It was there that his concern with the Holocaust grew, with the discovery of letters written by desperate Jewish parents pleading for their children to find refuge in pre-1939 Britain, even if they could not. Rushforth had no family connection with the horrors of Nazi Germany; none of his relatives perished; he was not Jewish. But the slim first novel that resulted, Kindergarten (by P.S. Rushforth, 1979), won the Hawthornden Prize, the long-established annual prize for "imaginative literature".

Teaching was demanding, however, and there was an increasingly frustrating conflict between that and the writing he felt he had to do. In 1994, friends took him to Brazil and, in Rushforth's words, "left me on a mountain for a month with nothing to do but write". He came home with 28,000 words of a rough draft and the following year handed in his notice.

Not until 2002, however, did he complete the 15th draft of Pinkerton's Sister. This 700-page novel, its narrator the self-styled "madwoman in the attic" Alice Pinkerton, gained worldwide recognition. It was Book of the Month in South Africa, where one of Rushforth's favourite reviews started, "This is not a book for everyone . . ."

Peter Rushforth was a man who generated staunch friends. He was addicted to theatre-going, with a quick, intelligent eye on the world of books. The prospect of sharing a platform with Margaret Atwood at the Vancouver festival had thrilled him. He loved Danish paintings of cool, secretive interiors and had been eager to spend hours writing in the new study he had had built in what he called the "worryingly symbolic" attic of his house in North Yorkshire.

Sheila Partington