During her long journalistic career, my friend Joanna Lyall, who has died aged 76, challenged preconceptions about what people with cancer needed to know about their illness. She also raised awareness about health and social issues such as bereavement, child carers and living with chronic illness.
In the mid 1980s, when she proposed a book to enable people with cancer to make informed decisions about their care, patient-focused information was limited. In Living With Cancer (1987), which we co-authored, Joanna dug deep into the emotional, social and financial challenges, and told the human story of cancer through patient experiences with her trademark compassion.
Born in Pimlico, central London, to Joan (nee Kenny) and Robert Lyall, an advertising executive, Joanna attended Our Lady of Sion Convent, in Bayswater, and later studied English and French at University College Dublin.
After working for the Kensington Post and the Western Daily Press in Bristol, Joanna joined General Practitioner (GP) in 1977, before turning freelance in 1980. By subsequently writing for both healthcare users, in newspapers such as the Guardian and Sunday Times, and care providers in GP, Nursing Times and the Health Service Journal, Joanna took her message about the need for jargon-free communication, shared decision making, and both specialist and community-based care, to a wide audience.
Joanna had strong French roots; an aunt was in the French Resistance during the second world war, and an uncle helped run an escape line across occupied France. Another uncle, Desmond Knox-Leet, co-founded Diptyque, which Joanna saw grow from a small shop in Paris in the 1960s to a global luxury perfume brand.
From 2010 to 2020, Joanna was honorary secretary of the Pugin Society and, through her writing, highlighted the significance of Pugin in 19th-century architecture and design.
Her genuine interest in other people’s lives led her into obituary writing for the Guardian and the British Medical Journal.
When diagnosed with pancreatic cancer earlier this year, Joanna refused to ask: “Why me?” and said she didn’t feel “shortchanged in the longevity stakes”. Like many of the people she had interviewed nearly four decades earlier, her request was for effective symptom control and her long-held belief in the importance of good palliative care proved justified.
Joanna was a much loved friend to a large circle of people. She is survived by her brother, Michael, her nieces, Alexandra and Katharine, her great-niece, Julia, and great-nephews, George and László.
