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Naomi Lewis |
Elder stateswoman of letters
NAOMI Lewis, has has died aged 97, had a long career as a writer and critic. But she will also be remembered by friends for her gentle compassion and humanist beliefs, often manifesting itself in her work nursing injured animals back to health.
Her career was varied. She wrote poetry and children's books, literary criticism and was a world authority on the works of Hans Christian Anderson.
Born in Great Yarmouth in 1911, her mother and father were Jewish, immigrants from Latvia. But they did not practise their religion and as Naomi grew up, her humanism and anti-theological philosophy was a vital part of her make up.
Her father was a herring seller and her mother an artist. They moved to Red Lion Square in Bloomsbury in 1935, and Naomi read English at the University of London. For a time she taught in a Yorkshire boarding school before heading back to teach in the East End. Intelligent, well read, and beautiful, she worked for a time as a fashion model and then during the second world war produced a comic strip for the Daily Worker.
She became a book reviewer in a way her friends described as typically eccentric of her: she began sending in written pieces under a number of different monikers to the weekly competitions in the New Statesman and won each time. She eventually revealed herself and was immediately offered a job as a reviewer, although she continued to work as a teacher, taking poetry classes at the City Lit. She then too on reviewing for the Observer, a job that would last four decades.
As well reviewing and writing children's books, she gave many lectures at the Conway Hall opposite her home on a wide variety of topics, such as Is Queen Victoria Dead? and on one of her favourite writes, Primo Levi. She was a member of the South Place Ethical Society and went each Sunday to concerts at the venue opposite her home. Naomi was also an avid reader of the New Journal – it was the last paper she read before she passed away.
Animals were a passion. She was a vegan for much of her life and would not let anything leather into her flat. She once calculated that she had saved on average a pigeon a day from painful deaths, often taking them into the basement of Conway Hall, where it was warm and roomy, to nurse them back to health – and out of claw's reach from the many stray cats she also cared for. She also requested that two rows of seats be reserved at any memorial held for her after her death for the pigeons who may want to come.
In 1975, Naomi was awarded the Eleanor Farjeon award for services to children's literature and was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981.
Naomi never married, despite many offers: she told friends she felt there were too many people in the world without her adding to it. She is survived by her brother, Toby and two nieces.
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