PJ Kavanagh: Award-winning author and journalist who was acclaimed as a poet of the transcendent

Though celebrated as a poet, Patrick Kavanagh first achieved literary distinction in 1966 with a remarkable work of prose, The Perfect Stranger, a memoir taking him to the age of 27. It won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize, for in reality it was a testimony to the absence of the one person who could help him work out the puzzle of life, his wife, Sally, who had died of polio in 1958.

Moreover, before he became known as a poet of the transcendent and the sensed but unseen features of human existence, he passed much of the 1960s working as an actor, and worked first as a Butlin's Redcoat, then as a newscaster in Paris for Radiodiffusion Française. Then in 1964 and 1965, he appeared with David Frost and Willie Rushton in Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, the age-of-satire successor to That Was the Week That Was.

This was appropriate for the son of Ted Kavanagh, famous as the writer of the great wartime comedy ITMA, "It's That Man Again". Born in Worthing in 1931, Patrick could remember his father trying out his uproarious scripts as the Blitz brought the bombs ever closer to their London house. A convent school in Barnes at the age of six was followed by public school at Douai, run by the Douai Abbey Benedictine monks in Woolhampton, Berkshire. He hated it (it became co-educational in 1993, but closed in 1999), though it was there that he discovered poetry, and he remembered the thrill of reading for the first time TS Eliot's Prufrock. At the Lycée Jaccard near Lausanne he began acting, while perfecting his French.

Called up for his National Service, Kavanagh was commissioned into the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. When the Korean War broke out he volunteered to be transferred to the Royal Ulster Rifles, and in Korea was wounded in action by a shot through the shoulder. Afterwards, reading English at Merton College, he found it difficult to take Oxford altogether seriously, and later said that he'd concentrated more on the pleasures of poetry and girls than on his degree.

After teaching at the British Institute in Barcelona in 1955, he married Sally (Sarah) Phillips the next year. She was the daughter of Wogan Phillips – who on inheriting his father's title as Baron Milford in 1962 was to become the only Communist to sit in the House of Lords – and the novelist, Rosamond Lehmann. In 1957 Patrick and Sally went to Jakarta, Indonesia, where he had a job with the British Council, and she died, suddenly and unexpectedly. To the distress of almost everyone concerned, Lehmann never got over Sally's death, and claimed to have had psychic experiences of her presence, which she related in Moments of Truth (1986).

In The Perfect Stranger Kavanagh said of his bereavement: "Once you've experienced the infinite significance of another person's life you feel something of the same for all lives. The rest of my life, any sense I can make of it, is a memorial to that."

He remained a Roman Catholic, and though much of his output is nature poetry tied to rural England, there is an unorthodox religious strain in his verse, as in the 1979 "Beyond Decoration": "It would not be exact to say I prayed; / What for? The one I wanted there was dead / All I could do was kneel and so I did. / At once I entered dark so vast and warm / I wondered it could fit inside the room". But perhaps of more importance is the ending of this exemplary poem, a virtual manifesto to write poetry without "decoration", with humility, in "plain rhyme", and as "clear" and "truthful" as he can make it. Most of his critics felt he had achieved this ambition.

Kavanagh published his first volume of poetry in 1959, with two more to come in the '60s. In the 1970s he turned to journalism to subsidise his poetry: from 1983 to 1996 he was a weekly columnist on The Spectator, and from 1996 to 2002 on the Times Literary Supplement.

He also wrote four novels: A Song and a Dance (1968) won the Guardian Fiction Prize, while Scarf Jack (1978) became a TV serial in 1981. His published poetry amounted to more than a dozen volumes by the time of New Selected Poems of 2014, and there were volumes of collected essays and newspaper columns, plus some anthologies, such as The Oxford Book of Short Poems (1985), co-edited with his great friend James Michie, with whom he took serious walking holidays, and Voices in Ireland: A Traveller's Literary Companion (1994). Kavanagh edited The Essential GK Chesterton, and, for Carcanet, a new edition of his Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney.

By 1963 he had moved to rural Gloucestershire, living in a rented cottage; in 1965 he married Catherine (Kate) Ward, a distinguished translator, and they lived with their two children in a large stone barn converted to her design, Sparrowthorn, at Elkstone, at one of the highest points of the Cotswolds, with spectacular views over a particularly lush valley. His writing room was a tiny restored cottage that was a short walk from the house, with no telephone, where he sat at a simple table surrounded by picture postcards of paintings fastened with drawing pins to the old beams; his routine was to write from mid-morning until six, when he could be found in the pub at Elkstone. µ PAUL LEVY

Patrick Joseph Gregory Kavanagh, poet, novelist, broadcaster and journalist: born Worthing, Sussex 6 January 1931; married 1956 Sarah (Sally) Phillips (died 1958), 1965 Catherine (Kate) Ward (two sons); died Gloucestershire 26 August 2015.