Inge Elsa Laird, who has died of cancer aged 71, was a generous-spirited supporter of the arts and a fine poet.

Throughout the 1980s, Inge became increasingly involved in the literary magazine New Departures and in the annual Poetry Olympics festival established by my father, the poet Michael Horovitz. She eventually became the co-editor of New Departures.

Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, the younger child of Margarete and Robert Drenker, Inge spent the second world war years unaware of the Jewish heritage that her mother's marriage to her Christian father hid. She only began to fully rediscover her Jewish identity after meeting members of my father's family in the 1980s.

After the war, Inge's parents divorced and she lived with her mother, step- father and brother Günther in a small flat near her aunt and uncle's farm, which cemented Inge's love of the countryside, especially after the privations of war in urban Düsseldorf. Inge revelled in school life, sports and the company of her fellow students.

Having started her working career as a teenager scouting out package holiday destinations for a German travel agency, she came to Britain in 1962 to brush up her English and worked as a model for portrait painting classes in Richmond, Surrey. She met and married the trumpeter Michael Laird and their daughter, Nicola, was born in 1964.

Inge settled into British life but never lost her connections with Germany – her accent stayed, though it softened. She worked at W & A Houben, a bookshop in Richmond, owned by a Holocaust survivor; for Lufthansa airlines; and for the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon as a translator and interpreter.

Inge found in herself an ever- deepening stillness as a poet and performer. She often collaborated with musicians to allow herself, and the words, time to breathe. Despite her illness in the last months of her life, she retained much of her beauty and joie de vivre, full of hope for the future and concern for others. She is survived by her husband, daughter and grandchildren, Benita and Max.