Human suffering frightens many people. Others, it ennobles and drives to action. The writer and human rights campaigner, Siobhan Dowd, who has died of cancer aged 47, was firmly in the latter category. A free spirit, with a zest for life, she was passionately committed to countering oppression and discrimination. She confronted the brutalities of the human condition head-on, with a rare blend of practical engagement and literary flair.
Siobhan was born in London, the youngest of the four daughters of an Irish nurse and her much older doctor husband, who had served bravely in the medical corps in the second world war, being one of the last men to be evacuated from Dunkirk. Though she grew up in Streatham and attended a Catholic grammar school in south London, from an early age Siobhan was Irish at heart. She spent long periods at her parents' cottage at Aglish in county Waterford, then later at another family home in Wicklow Town. Throughout her life, she manifested Celtic spontaneity, bursting into song when an accordion played, or leaping up to dance to a favourite tune.
Siobhan won a place at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she obtained a degree in classics. After a short stint in publishing, she found congenial work in 1984 with English PEN, the writers' organisation, as the researcher for its writers in prison committee. While there, she edited an important collection of writings by authors and journalists imprisoned for their work.
Her total lack of concern for her physical appearance at this stage of her life dismayed some of the more genteel supporters of PEN and belied her efficiency. She professionalised the campaigning work on behalf of incarcerated writers, becoming a knowledgeable and stern critic of repressive regimes.
These skills enabled her to move on to spend seven years in New York, carrying out similar work for American PEN. This included founding and leading the Salman Rushdie defence committee in the US and travelling to Indonesia and Guatemala to investigate human rights conditions for writers. She was prolific in the production of reports and articles, and was by then also giving free rein to her creative side by writing short stories.
Siobhan particularly empathised with the condition and cultures of marginalised peoples, including Irish travellers and the Roma. She co-edited an anthology of Romany poems and short prose pieces. When she decided to do postgraduate work in gender and ethnic studies at Greenwich University in London, she focused on how Roma relate to their community's narratives and stereotypes. She was awarded an MA with distinction.
She also became increasingly interested in children, leading to her appointment in 2004 as deputy commissioner for children's rights in Oxfordshire, working with local authorities to ensure that statutory services affecting children conformed to UN protocols. She settled happily in west Oxford for her final years.
Siobhan's incarnation as a novelist came comparatively late, though she had long been bubbling with ideas. In 2003, she began writing a children's book about a boy with Asperger's syndrome who solves a mystery. She was halfway through this when Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, with its similar theme, burst onto the scene. Siobhan therefore put aside for a while what would later become her second published novel, The London Eye Mystery (2007), a story for nine to 12-year-olds, while she worked on other projects, including Bog Child and Solace of the Road (both of which are due for publication next year).
Her first novel to appear in print was A Swift Pure Cry (2006), a troubling tale, based on events in Ireland in the early 1980s, in which a 15-year-old girl, Shell, struggles to survive in a world of poverty, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy and moral hypocrisy. She wrote it in three months in the autumn of 2004.
Siobhan's fictional debut was met with immediate critical acclaim. It was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction prize and in May this year, Waterstone's identified her as one of the top 25 authors for the future. Though she maintained her campaigning zeal, as co-founder of English PEN's readers and writers programme, promoting writing in prisons and deprived communities, she was quickly becoming a full-time author with an ambitious programme of speaking tours and events, which was cut short by breast cancer.
Typically, while dying, Siobhan thought of other people, setting up a trust for promoting literature among youth offenders and other disadvantaged young people, into which her future royalties will be channelled.
She married twice, first a young Irishman, Mial Pagan, and later the librarian and musician Geoff Morgan, both of whom survive her.
· Siobhan Dowd, writer and human rights activist, born February 4 1960; died August 21 2007
