My partner, Rebecca Hall, who has died aged 78, was a woman with many gifts and interests – perhaps too many, to the detriment of her talent as a writer.

Rebecca was a prize-winning screenwriter, adapting Klaus Mann’s The Volcano for a film by the German director Ottokar Runze in 1999; a clever poet in her book Fruits of Paradise (1999), a collection of daily thoughts, poems and philosophies; a fearless campaigner, who documented cases of medical malpractice in Indefensible Treatment (1985); and a determined advocate for animals in Animals Are Equal (1980) and Voiceless Victims (1984).

Her semi-autobiographical novel, Frances and Her Ghosts, published under the name Rebecca Hughes Hall, was finished in 2023, just before she began losing speech and memory as a result of frontal lobe dementia.

Born in Hereford, Rebecca was the second of the three children of Tom Hughes, an insurance broker, and Marjorie (nee Evans), a spiritual healer. When she was four, her family moved to Bristol, then later to Nottingham and finally to Sutton, Surrey. She was educated at Oxted grammar school and gained a languages degree at Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster).

Fluent in Spanish, French and German, she worked in the late 1960s as a translator; additionally, she could converse in Dutch, Italian and Portuguese, and was frighteningly articulate in English. With a gift for editing, Rebecca joined the New English Library in 1972, moving to WH Allen in 1974, before becoming a freelance editor for Michael Joseph. She left publishing in 1979 to write herself.

Rebecca was interested in so many things and people; she explored art, design, culture, astronomy and astrology, as well as alternative religions, therapies and healing. She was herself a healer, helping many people and animals.

A committee member of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, Rebecca would protest at laboratories, openly challenge slaughtermen and the drivers of battery chicken transporters. All of this she did without judgment, saying there was always a better alternative to cruelty.

Rebecca and I met in 1971 when I answered an ad she placed in the listings magazine Time Out; she was looking for interesting work. Boy, was she interesting! I introduced her to my publishers, and we later worked on scripts together. This was not love at first sight but, at our second meeting, I had a premonition that I would be with her for a long time.

She was then married to Ian Hall, with whom she had two small children, Matthew and Cassian. In 1972 Rebecca became my life partner, and eventually, in 2022, my civil partner.

She is survived by me, her sons and three grandsons, Thomas, James and Alexander. Another grandson, William, died in 2022.