Novelist and children's author Jill Paton Walsh died last month at the age of 83. Her self-published novel Knowledge of Angels – half-fable, half-parable and rather hard work – was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize (a vintage year: George Mackay Brown also made the final six and one of the judges later dismissed the winner, James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late, as “crap”).

The devout daughter of “nominally Catholic” parents, Paton Walsh had what she described as a “crummy” convent education in north Finchley. “Remember, Gillian”, one nun told her, “there is no beatitude ‘Blessed are the clever’.” Undeterred, she got into Oxford, where she fell under the spell of Iris Murdoch. She wrote a number of successful books for children before her first adult novel, the excruciatingly autobiographical and now entirely forgotten Lapsing, in 1987.