Acclaimed Irish author Maurice Leitch dies aged 90 after award-winning career spanning 50 years
Acclaimed Irish author and broadcaster Maurice Leitch has died, aged 90, in England.
The Co Antrim-born writer enjoyed a stellar career which spanned over 50 years.
He is best known for his novels The Liberty Lad, Poor Lazarus, which won the Guardian Book Prize, and Silver’s City, which won the Whitbread Prize.
In his work, Leitch explored the frustrations and tensions of Northern Ireland.
He began writing children’s stories for the BBC while teaching in Co Antrim.
He then joined the broadcaster fulltime in 1960, and went on to serve as editor of BBC Radio 4′s Book at Bedtime series from 1977 to 1989.
He was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 1998.
James Doyle, whose Turnpike Books published his last novel, Gone to Earth in 2019, described Leitch as “a Protestant but not a unionist writer”.
John Hewitt, a left-wing, Protestant poet and critic, said of Leitch that he “had let the side down”.
However, fellow Belfast writer Robert McLiam Wilson praised his “glorious, inconvenient voice”.