Award winning journalist and author Deborah Orr, whose work has appeared in many major magazines and newspapers and who was the first female editor of the Guardian's Weekend magazine, died October 19. She was 57. Her memoir, Motherwell: A Girlhood, is due to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in January. Orr "made her most public mark as a columnist, one of the small tribe of trenchant writers with the panache to walk the high wire of tackling social, political and personal issues in an engaging manner, week after week, in her case for the next two decades," the Guardian noted.
"She was completely inspiring and never knowingly not difficult, but beyond the ferocity, she had a huge heart," said novelist Andrew O'Hagan, who became friends with Orr after writing for her at Weekend. "She said what she thought, and it could be quite bracing, but it was always something she actually did think. She was outspoken, but the things she was speaking about were very original."
Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, described Orr as "a brilliant, clever, funny writer and editor whose uncompromising and insightful approach to her work brought powerful journalism to the Guardian over many years."
W&N's publisher, Jenny Lord, told the Bookseller: "To say we are devastated by the loss of this most remarkable of women--an intellectual force, a writer whose life and career has most certainly been cut short far too soon--is the wildest understatement. Deborah was a writer we had all admired long before we became her publisher. With her unrivaled ability to stare at something (sometimes someone) right in the eye, she was an inspiration as well as an exceptional writer. It became clear, very quickly, that Motherwell: A Girlhood was the book Deborah was always supposed to write. It wasn't always easy to do so--it would be weird if mining for difficult memories was not brutalizing at times--but it poured out of her in almost perfect form. My editorial input centered largely around asking her for more; and more and more. It also became clear, very quickly, that Motherwell should be not just Deborah's debut, but the first book of many.
"Her voice, so sharp, deliciously spiky, crystalline and true. Her dialogue, so precise yet so easy. If she was born to write this incredible memoir, this reckoning that it turned out was bubbling away under the surface for so long, she was surely also born to write fiction. It is grossly unfair for all of us that those future books will have to remain unwritten, but we hope that Motherwell can be a lasting testament to a life lived in defiance, with ferocity and strength, and always alive to the humor to be found in both absurdity and banality. We will miss Deborah enormously and our thoughts are with her friends and family."
Describing Orr as "beautiful, fierce and funny," her literary agent, Clare Conville, said: "When I first suggested she write a book some 12 years ago, she roared with laughter and replied, 'I have nothing to say.' Unusually for Deborah she proved herself wrong. Her memoir when it finally came was astonishing. Painful and revealing in parts, joyful in others. A tour de force of the form itself."