Kate Saunders, who has died aged 62, was a prize-winning novelist, journalist and critic whose many achievements emerged despite a life of suffering and loss.
Kate initially worked as an actor, joining the National Theatre in 1983, an experience that inspired her second novel, Storm in the Citadel (1989), and the third of her detective novels, The Mystery of the Sorrowful Maiden (2021). She also made an early appearance as a policewoman dated by Rodney Trotter in an episode of Only Fools and Horses in 1982. Being steeped in Victorian and Edwardian classic literature from childhood, however, she soon realised that her true calling was writing, and by the age of 26 had won a Betty Trask prize with her first novel, The Prodigal Father (1986). As she put it, characteristically: “I was quite plain for an actress, but for a writer I was GORGEOUS.”
