Kate Saunders, a writer, journalist, and critic who had a hard life but still did a lot, died at the age of 62. She won a lot of awards for her work, even though she had to deal with pain and loss.
Kate was an actress before she joined the National Theatre in 1987. This gave her ideas for her second book, Castlestorm, which came out in 1989, and her third crime novel, The Sad Maid, which will be published in 2021. In 1982, she went out with Rodney Trotter on an episode of Only Fools and Horses, where she was also a police officer. Early on, she read a lot of Victorian and Edwardian books, but she soon realised that writing was her true calling. When she was 26, her first book, The Prodigal Father, won the Betty Trask Award. “For an actor, I’m just average, but for a writer, I’m beautiful,” she always said.
This was the start of his writing career, and he went on to write more than 20 books for adults and kids, including historical tales, detective stories, and books for kids. As a writer for The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Express, She, and The Cosmopolitan, she wrote about the 1990 Booker Prize and persuaded the other judges that AS Byatt’s “Possession” should win. She was also a judge for the 2007 Women’s Award, which went to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for her book Half of a Yellow Sun.
Kate is the oldest of six children. She was born in London to a devoutly Catholic English family with an artistic charm, warmth, and oddness. Basil Saunders, her father, was an early supporter of public relations, and Betty Smith, her mother, was a writer for The Church Times. Their home on Park Avenue in Dartmouth is so messy that Kate said, “We might have been arrested if we weren’t middle class.” Both she and her brothers didn’t go to college because they worked in fields like publishing or journalism. Kate went to Camden Girls’ School and worked with the Anna Shell Theatre Company to learn how to act.
