Booker prize winning author Bernice Rubens, who once said "I feel unclean if I don't write every day", has died in hospital in London, weeks after a memoir.

"She was writing, writing, writing right up to the final weeks of her life," her agent, Charles Walker, said yesterday. "The memoir is more or less finished."

She had been in hospital since suffering a stroke a fort night ago. At the age of 76 her work rate was unrelenting. She published two novels in the last three years, the most recent, The Sergeant's Tale, a startlingly topical book linking the British mandate in postwar Palestine with the problems of contemporary Israel.

She also worked as a documentary film maker, and two of her own books were filmed, most memorably Madame Sousatzka in 1962, directed by John Schlesinger and starring Shirley MacLaine.

She was brought up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Cardiff, where her father had arrived as a Russian refugee, and where she was born in 1928.

Many readers came to her work through the literary festival circuit, on which she was a virtuoso reader of her own and other authors' work. Her own work was relished for its wry humour, sly observation of character and cracking plots, as much as its political themes and examination of the Jewish identity.

Last year when the Guardian nominated 101 worthy women left out of Prospect Magazine's top 100 public intellectuals, we in turn left out Bernice Rubens. Readers' protests poured in and she was hastily added to a revised list.

She won the Booker in its second year, 1970 - from an exceptional short list including books by Iris Murdoch and William Trevor - for The Elected Member, a study of mental illness and the theories of RD Laing.