Obituary: Josephine Hart, writer

Josephine Hart was a central and colourful figure in London's artistic and political life. She wrote several novels (her first, Damage, was a worldwide success and made into a film by Louis Malle), produced plays and founded Gallery Poets at the British Library where she cajoled leading actors to recite famous works.

Hart had a way of persuading such stars as Edward Fox, Dame Eileen Atkins, Bob Geldoff and Harold Pinter to deliver readings of favourite works. They responded willingly to her suggestions - she had the knack of choosing the right reader with the appropriate poet - and they never asked for a fee. And as the wife of Lord Maurice Saatchi, at the centre of political life.

Josephine Hart was the daughter of a garage owner who was educated at a convent school in County Monaghan. Her childhood was beset by tragedy - two brothers and a sister died.

It was not until she wrote Damage that she seemed to come to terms with the personal anxieties that stemmed from her childhood. Significantly the first lines of the novel read, "There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it, ease like water over a stone, on to its fluid contours, and are home."

In 1964 Hart went to London, where she took acting classes at night and began working for Michael Heseltine's company, Haymarket Publishing.

She rose to become its only woman director and married her first husband Paul Buckley, who also worked there. In 1991 she published Damage, about a politician obsessed with his son's fiance. Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche - the former became a regular at the Hart poetry evenings - gave highly charged performances in the Malle film.

Hart's second novel was published the following year. Sin deals with an equally controversial subject - a woman who seduces her adopted sister's husband and moves in with him. Hart also produced plays in the West End; her most startling successes included the award-winning The House of Bernarda Alba by Lorca (with Joan Plowright) and Nol Coward's The Vortex. TS Eliot was her favourite poet and in 1987 she produced Let Us Go Then, You and I, a compilation of his work. It was intended as a one-off event but the show ran for six weeks.

In 1987 Hart organised her first public reading at a gallery in London's Cork Street. The actor Gary Bond gave a beguiling reading of Auden poems and Hart was sufficiently encouraged to make the event monthly.

Over the next quarter of a century she engaged such stars as Brian Cox, Bono, Grey Gowrie, Edna O'Brien and Harriet Walter to read poems.

Some readers were encouraged to break new ground professionally under Hart's encouraging guidance.Not least, Roger Moore (not a well-known stage performer) delivered a stimulating rendering of Kipling's The Mary Gloster, Juliet Stevenson read Emily Dickenson and Ralph Fiennes Auden. Pinter read with great sensitivity the works of Philip Larkin and Bob Geldof boomed out enthusiastically WB Yeats. Hart's charm and sheer determination made every evening memorable and seats were difficult to obtain.

Last week one of her poetry readings began its all too short run in a small West End theatre with a cast including Jeremy Irons and Felicity Kendal reading from Paradise Lost.

In her novels Hart was unfailingly courageous - dealing with thorny social problems. She confronted them head on in a direct and sensitive manner. Human relations - good, awful and depressing - fascinated her but in private life she was an ebullient and gracious lady who enjoyed the banter of everyday life.

It was with that style and courage that she confronted the onset of cancer. Hart, typically, told very few people about her illness. It was, however, her love of poetry for which she will be remembered and from which she drew solace. She once said: "Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable."

Josephine Hart's first marriage was dissolved. In 1984 she married Maurice Saatchi. He and a son by each marriage survive her.