Nicholas Mosley dies

Whitbread award-winning author Nicholas Mosley has died, aged 93.

Mosley was the author of 13 novels, including Accident, originally published in 1965; Impossible Object (1968), shortlisted for the first Booker prize in 1969; Hopeful Monsters, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1990; The Hesperides Tree; and the novel Inventing God, a book exploring how individual actions can influence the world. He also wrote biographies, one of which about Leon Trotsky, and a two-volume study of his father Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, as well as his own wartime memoir, Time at War, in 2006, about his time in the Rifle Brigade during the course of which service he won a Military Cross.

Mosley is published by Dalkey Archive Press (all above named titles part of its British Literature Series) and he continues to be represented by agency Peters Fraser + Dunlop (PFD) who refered to him as one of its "much-treasured long-standing authors" and "a superb writer".

A spokesperson for PFD said: "Nicholas Mosley was one of our much-treasured long-standing authors, and we are proud to continue to represent his body of work to the world. At this time, our thoughts are with his family and our memories of him are fond."

His first agent at PFD, Michael Sissons, recalled that "although we were very proud when he won the Whitbread with Hopeful Monsters, I thought him a superb writer of non-fiction and was particularly delighted to persuade him, late in life, to write the account of his wartime campaign in Italy, during which he fought with great distinction".

Peter Matson, who represented US rights on many of Nicholas’s titles for some decades, said it was "a special pleasure and privilege" to work with the author. "His sentences were so distinctly his own that I can remember the exact time and place when I first made their acquaintance: Accident had just been published in England. The many books that followed never failed to fascinate, never failed to expand his unique, impassioned view of this fractious world. Though his uncompromising techniques were at times difficult for the American reader, his work should remain with us as long as there are discerning readers of the English language," he said.

The agency added: "Nicholas will be deeply missed."

John O'Brien, publisher at Dalkey Archive Press, told The Bookseller Mosley was "the most daring and accomplished writer to come after World War II in England, and perhaps beyond". The author became one of his closest friends after first meeting in the late 1970s.

"I met him as a novelist, and that is what he always remained for me. Friend and writer," O'Brien recalled. "Nicholas did things in his fiction that no other writer has ever been able to do, and here I am referring to technical methods that led directly to opening up a world of possibilities in fiction. He discovered a new way of writing a love story, and a way that rang true. I have friends who, when some of their friends fall in love, give to their friends a copy of Impossible Object because it so perfectly captures the ecstasy and suffering of that condition. But it was through these same technical discoveries that he was able to move outside the personal to issues of politics. His great theme throughout his work was how the personal related to the public self, and that if one cannot behave decently on a personal level, then what chances that the public-political self could do any better? 

"He was in most ways a romantic writer who believe that anything was possible, and in novel after novel he sought to find or create models of behavior that took into account the innate weakness of humans even while they were attempting to find new ways of conceiving the world and their place in it, ways of inventing themselves through an awareness of that self observing this invention.

"I have long held the belief that Nicholas is the most daring and accomplished writer to come after World War II in England, and perhaps beyond. No writer was doing what Nicholas was throughout his work. He was exploring human consciousness in ways that no other writer had before or after."