Martin Booth 1944 - 2004
English writer Martin Booth was dying of brain cancer for 18 months but medical science kept him alive and conscious.
The compulsive writer used that added time to good account; in the last year of his life, he wrote three books for children and Gweilo, an autobiographical account of his childhood in Hong Kong. It will be published posthumously.
Booth, who died last week aged 59, grew up in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s and went to King George V School. He spent 12 years of his childhood in the city and regarded it as his second home, returning almost every year.
He used the city as a backdrop for what many critics say is his greatest work, The Iron Tree, a heart-wrenching and evocative novel set in Yau Ma Tei in the early 1960s and centred on a dying, troubled former priest.
He will perhaps be best remembered in Hong Kong for his history book, Opium, and his novel about a former prisoner of war and survivor of the atom bomb, Hiroshima Joe.
Booth was much more than a novelist. His first yearnings were for poetry, which he loved. He wrote successful children's books, travel accounts, histories, reminiscences and television scripts.