My father, Emrys Bryson, who has died aged 93, was a feature writer and theatre critic for the Nottingham Evening Post for 40 years. His reviews, often hammered out at midnight in the deserted newsroom, were always sparky and entertaining. Thanks to his funny weekly column, On-Spec, and the books he wrote about Nottingham, he became a recognisable and much-loved part of the fabric of the city he had adopted as his own.

Emrys was born in Tipton in the West Midlands to Frank, a railway worker, and his wife, Gertrude (nee Jevons). He went to Queen Mary’s school in Walsall before joining the weekly Walsall Times at the age of 16. In 1946 he began as a general reporter for the Nottingham Evening Post and its sister morning paper, the Nottingham Guardian.

Contracting a rare form of tuberculosis in 1950, he lived for three years in a sanatorium, eventually recovering thanks to a pioneering and unconventional treatment. He came straight back to the Post, where colleagues over the years remember his kindness, his mischievous sense of humour and his companionable habit of spiriting sweets out his jacket pockets. It was at the Post that he met my mother, Marian Brown, also a journalist, and they married in 1958.

Em, as he was widely known, gave the long-running thriller The Mousetrap its first review when it had its world premiere at Nottingham Theatre Royal in 1952. He covered the fraught birth of the Nottingham Playhouse when the dismissal of its director John Neville became a cause celebre, interviewed stars of stage and screen when they came to Nottingham, and gave rising stars reviews in their early careers that they would remember him for years later.

As well as writing about the stage, Em wrote for it. One of his revues, Owd Yer Tight, took its name from a dialect phrase much used by Nottingham bus conductors, and opened the first arts festival at Nottingham Playhouse in 1965. It appeared in print two years later.

His second book, Portrait of Nottingham, was published in 1974 and reprinted three times. The novelist Alan Sillitoe wrote in the foreword: “Whoever carries this book about will have the soul of the city as an intimate companion.”

His features were published in many other journals and magazines, including several in the Manchester Guardian. He contributed regularly to Radio Nottingham and, later, Saga Radio. He even wrote the lyrics (in his lunch hour, as a hasty revue collaboration) to a Matt Monro song, One Day.

Marian died in 2002. Emrys is survived by his children, Paul, Kate and me, and his granddaughters, Lois, May and Bonnie.