Josephine Hart:JOSEPHINE HART, who has died aged 69, was a best-selling novelist and ardent advocate of poetry.
Married to the advertising mogul Lord Saatchi, she was author of the novel Damage, the story of a politician obsessed by his son's fiancee. The book sold almost a million copies worldwide, and a film version starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche was directed by Louis Malle.
Her poetry evenings at the British Library were hugely popular with audiences and readers alike.
Former poet laureate Andrew Motion said: “Josephine was a writer of terrific flair and force, and the work she undertook for writing itself, especially for poetry, showed an equal passion.”
Paying tribute to the “kindest of friends, the biggest of morale-lifters”, Bob Geldof said: “London is less; we are diminished.”
Born Josephine Harte in Mullingar, Co Westmeath, in 1942, she attended the Presentation Convent and completed her education at the St Louis Convent in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan.
She started work in the ESB's Mullingar showrooms. A member of a local drama group, in the early 1960s she acted in a number of productions including The Righteous are Boldand The Plough and the Stars.
In 1963 she emigrated and in London worked in the telesales department of Thomson Newspapers, then publishers of the Timesnewspapers.
She attended acting classes in the evenings at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama but did not pursue a stage career. Of her ability as an actor she said: “I was incredibly powerful with absolutely no technique.”
She next worked for Haymarket Publications, the trade publisher owned by Michael Heseltine. Moving up the ranks, she became the firm’s only woman director. It was there she met Maurice Saatchi, and was briefly his boss. They were married in 1984.
She believed she and her husband were soulmates: “It is a very good combination, the Irish woman and the Jew,” she said.
In the 1980s she was again drawn to the theatre, this time as a producer. West End plays she produced include The House of Bernardo Albaby Federico Garcia Lorca, Noël Coward's The Vortexand The Black Princeby Iris Murdoch.
Her first public poetry reading, at a gallery in Cork Street in 1987, featured Gary Bond reading Auden.
Also in 1987 she produced a two-hour staging of Eliot's poetry Let Us Go Then, You and I. It was a great success and the original four-week run was extended to six at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue.
In due course what had been Gallery Poetsbecame the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour, a monthly event at the British Library.
Among those who took part in readings of work by Sylvia Plath, WB Yeats, Philip Larkin and Emily Dickinson were Juliet Stevenson, Edward Fox, Roger Moore, Harriet Walter, Bob Geldof, Harold Pinter, Eileen Atkins, Bono and Dominic West.
In Catching Life by the Throat(2006), the book of poems that came out of these readings, she wrote: "Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable."
Explaining the relatively late start to her writing career, she said: “I always thought of myself as a writer who just didn’t write.” Eventually her husband told her she was getting older and that it was going to be more painful not to write than to release her voice.
Her second novel, Sin, was published in 1992, and four further novels followed.
None achieved the commercial success of Damage, although The Truth about Love(2009) was well received.
Set in Ireland, the book draws on her memory of growing up in Mullingar, notably the death of her brother Owen who was killed in an explosion while he was experimenting with chemicals.
Joseph O’Connor praised its “fiery and eloquent prose” and “brilliantly conveyed” characters “impossible, once encountered, to forget”.
In 1989 she presented the series Books By My Bedsidefor Thames TV, interviewing various personalities about their current reading. In 1993, at the invitation of Eliot's widow Valerie, she presented the first TS Eliot poetry prize to Ciaran Carson.
She presented a poetry hour dedicated to WB Yeats at the National Library of Ireland in 2007, and was a Booker, Whitbread, Irish Times, Forward Poetry and Costa Book awards prize judge. A second book on poetry, Words that Burn: How to Read Poetry and Why, was published in 2008. She was a former chairwoman of the Ireland Fund of Great Britain.
She is survived by her husband Maurice, their son Edward, and Adam, the son of her first marriage to Paul Buckley.
Josephine Hart: born March 1st, 1942; died June 2nd, 2011