My friend Nicky Singer, who has died aged 66 after a stroke, was a writer of fierce integrity and great perception.
She had published four novels for adults in the 1990s before turning to fiction for younger readers with Feather Boy (2002), whose plot was inspired by a derelict house in Hove, near her home in Brighton. Tackling the subject of bullying, the book was adapted into a Bafta award-winning BBC television series in 2004 and a youth musical at the National Theatre in 2006.
Further children’s novels followed, including Knight Crew (2009), which was adapted into a community opera, a process documented in the BBC TV series Gareth Malone Goes to Glyndebourne (2010). Her play Island (2012), which was set in the Canadian Arctic and dealt with the effects of global warming, had a successful run at the NT and a subsequent schools’ tour.
Nicky was born in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, the second of five children to Geoffrey, an electronics engineer, and Sheila (nee King), a physiotherapist, piano teacher and homemaker. When she was 14, her father died suddenly, an experience that profoundly affected her. She attended Queen Anne’s school, Caversham, in Reading, and studied English at Bristol University, graduating in 1978.
Nicky began writing at an early age, winning a story competition when she was six. She wrote every day, saying “writing is like breathing, if you don’t do it, you die a little”.
When she was 17, she met James King-Smith, a school friend of her brother’s, who became a barrister. They married in 1983 and moved to Brighton, where James had chambers.
After working in the talks department at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and as a researcher for a Channel 4 chat show in the early 1980s, Nicky established Performing Arts Labs, a charity that trained new writers for theatre, screen and opera, which she ran with Susan Benn until 1996. When, in 1987, her mother died of cancer, she reflected this loss in her first novel, To Have and to Hold (1993).
In 2015, Nicky and I met by chance in a bookshop in Brighton and she told me that she had been working on turning Island into a novel. I was astonished to hear that her publishers had rejected it for being “a quiet book”. Undaunted and with characteristic single-mindedness, Nicky said that she was going to self-publish. In admiration, I offered to illustrate it. When the manuscript arrived, I fell in love with the story and was delighted when Nicky allowed me 20 pages for illustrations.
Three years later, Nicky sent me what I believe is her finest novel, The Survival Game (2018), a heart-stopping narrative of refugees fleeing the effects of climate change, set in a dystopian near future.
Nicky wrote with a warm wit and a willingness to confront difficult truths and defend vulnerable people and a vulnerable planet.
She is survived by James and their children, Roland, Edmund and Xavier.
