Tributes paid to 'inspiring' Deborah Orr after death aged 57

Tributes have been paid to “inspiring” author and journalist Deborah Orr after she died of cancer at the age of 57.

Orr was an award-winning journalist whose work appeared in the Guardian, Independent, Sunday Times and magazines like Vogue, Grazia and Marie Claire. She was also a contributing editor to AnOther Magazine and was the first female editor of the Guardian’s Weekend Magazine aged 30.

Motherwell: A Girlhood, her memoir of early life growing up in Motherwell and Orr's relationship with her mother, is due to be published by W&N on 23rd January 2020.

A Bookseller interview promoting the title was cancelled earlier this year after Orr, who was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010, was told it had returned. Instead, associate editor Caroline Sanderson wrote a review this month describing the book as “an outstanding memoir which… sets the bar very high for the genre in 2020”.

W&N’s publisher Jenny Lord said: "To say we are devasted by the loss of this most remarkable of women – an intellectual force, a writer whose life and career has most certainly been cut short far too soon – is the wildest understatement. Deborah was a writer we had all admired long before we became her publisher. With her unrivalled ability to stare at something (sometimes someone) right in the eye, she was an inspiration as well as an exceptional writer. It became clear, very quickly, that Motherwell: A Girlhood was the book Deborah was always supposed to write. It wasn’t always easy to do so – it would be weird if mining for difficult memories was not brutalising at times – but it poured out of her in almost perfect form. My editorial input centred largely around asking her for more; and more and more. It also became clear, very quickly, that Motherwell should be not just Deborah’s debut, but the first book of many.

"Her voice, so sharp, deliciously spiky, crystalline and true. Her dialogue, so precise yet so easy. If she was born to write this incredible memoir, this reckoning that it turned out was bubbling away under the surface for so long, she was surely also born to write fiction. It is grossly unfair for all of us that those future books will have to remain unwritten, but we hope that Motherwell can be a lasting testament to a life lived in defiance, with ferocity and strength, and always alive to the humour to be found in both absurdity and banality. We will miss Deborah enormously and our thoughts are with her friends and family."

Orion m.d. Katie Espiner added: "We are devastated. Deborah was fabulous, furious, generous, brilliant. From the moment she joined W&N we have all been honoured to be in her orbit. It is cruelly unfair that she died before she could see the publication of Motherwell, but she was thrilled with the ecstatic early responses, and we will do all we can to honour her."

Orr's literary agent Clare Conville said Orr was "beautiful, fierce and funny". She said: "When I first suggested she write a book some 12 years ago she roared with laughter and replied, 'I have nothing to say'. Unusually for Deborah she proved herself wrong. Her memoir when it finally came was astonishing. Painful and revealing in parts, joyful in others. A tour de force of the form itself. Even when mortally ill we discussed her next book, a novel. 'It’s writing itself in my head,' she said. She relished the early quotes and loved making the PR plans for Motherwell. Utterly professional and generous of spirit to work with she was also a beloved friend of many years. Her loss to her children Ivan and Luther, her step-children Alexis and Madeleine and her many friends who adored her is incalculable."

Also paying tribute, Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner said Orr was “a brilliant, clever, funny writer and editor whose uncompromising and insightful approach to her work brought powerful journalism to the Guardian over many years.”

Novelist Andrew O’Hagan told the paper: “She was completely inspiring and never knowingly not difficult, but beyond the ferocity, she had a huge heart.”

Dialogue publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove tweeted: “Sad to learn of the death of Deborah Orr - she was totally committed to her truths & had an incredible way of conveying her thoughts to the world. She will be missed. Rest in Power Deborah.”

Orr, who was divorced from Will Self, is survived by sons Ivan and Luther alongside stepchildren Alexis and Madeleine.