Anthony Masters

Versatile writer best known for his children's fiction and 'Book Explosions'

Anthony Richard Masters, writer: born Esher, Surrey 14 December 1940; married 1964 Robina Farbrother (two sons, one daughter); died Hastings, East Sussex 4 April 2003

Anthony Masters was a writer, educator and humanitarian of exceptional gifts and prodigious energy. He was, in the parlance of his spiritual ancestors, the ancient mariners, that rare voyager "as gracious as a trade wind and as dependable as an anchor".

Masters embarked on his eventful and versatile career when still a teenager. Having organised a rebellion in his public school, King's College, Wimbledon, against the obligatory investment in its antiquated uniform, he found himself promptly expelled and in need of earning a living.

So he became the writer he had always wanted to be and published, in 1964, aged 23, A Pocketful of Rye, a collection of short stories of exquisite imaginative range and freshness of style which was runner-up for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. Masters won the prize two years later with his second book, the novel The Seahorse. Thereafter, he tested his considerable literary muscles by writing both fiction and non-fiction.

He leaves 11 works of adult fiction – notably, Conquering Heroes (1969), Red Ice (1986, with Nicholas Barker), The Men (1997), The Good and Faithful Servant (1999) and Lifers (2001) – and was in the process of completing another, Dark Bridges, which he thought would be his best. Many of these works carry deep insights into social problems that he gained, over four decades, by helping the socially excluded, be it by running soup kitchens for drug addicts or by campaigning for the civic rights of gypsies and other ethnic minorities.

His non-fiction output was typically eclectic. It ranged from the biographies of such diverse personalities as Hannah Senesh (The Summer that Bled, 1972), Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin: the father of anarchism, 1974), Nancy Astor (Nancy Astor: a life, 1981) and the British secret service chief immortalised by Ian Fleming in his James Bond books (The Man Who Was M: the life of Maxwell Knight, 1984), to a history of the notorious asylum Bedlam (Bedlam, 1977).

Excellent as these books are, Masters outshone most of his contemporaries with the quality of his fiction for young people. In retrospect, The Seahorse, set in a seaside private school for difficult boys, can be considered as the precursor of this extraordinary volume of work. His exploration of the inner world of the male adolescent – these days even more alienated from the arts and literature – carries a sensitivity that few writers can match.

The mind of the adolescent, caught on the cusp between childhood and maturity, struggling with trust and distrust of family, with confusion and awe towards life, with harsh reality and magical fantasy, defeats most writers. Masters fathomed it brilliantly. And, whilst titles such as Badger (1986), Streetwise (1987), Nobody's Child (1989), Wicked (1997) and the incomparable Finding Joe (2000) have become classics of their genre, new ventures such as the innovative Ginn series, for children with special needs, and "Weird World", a series with supernatural dimensions, have broken new ground.

Tony Masters was never one to rest on his laurels. The mere thought of leisure and relaxation made him cringe. Consequently, he never stopped searching for new ways to inspire young minds. His firm belief that literature and the arts were the only paths that would lead all people to the betterment of their lives, and that creativity and the art of narration were the common heritage for us all, led him to the conviction that these gifts existed in their purest forms – in Platonic dimensions, as it were – in children. All that an unprecedented flowering of literacy required, he proposed, was finding a way of stimulating children to express their own creativity.

To this end, elaborating on the concept of "event operas" for children that he had used as an effective educational tool in the 1970s, he devised a series of adventure workshops, which he called "Book Explosions", and which he personally ran in schools all over the UK and the United States. Essentially, these Book Explosions provided, for some two hours, a dramatic interpretation of a particular event – say, the eviction of gypsies from a legal campsite.

The participating children became involved in the given theme and enacted the consequences of this fantasised event using a plethora of props likely to be found on the site. This activity ("safe danger", Masters called it) not only increased the children's awareness of their own bodies – creating, in the process, a sense of personal confidence – but also stimulated their imagination. Thus, when, in the last third of the workshop, the children were asked to write about their feelings about the simulated event, they did so readily, often lying on the floor in a foetal position, "as if sheltering from the stress of the experience".

And invariably they produced powerful texts with striking images.

Moris Farhi