LONDON, July 3 (UPI) -- British writer Beryl Bainbridge, celebrated for her dark comic novels, died of cancer in London at the age of 77.
Bainbridge, a former actress, became famous in the 1960s with a string of "taut, often bleakly funny novels that drew heavily on her experiences growing up in a shabby-genteel household in Liverpool during and after World War II," The New York Times said Friday.
Her fiction encompassed a "drab dreamland" epitomized in such works as "The Bottle Factory Outing" and "A Quiet Life," the Times said, adding that novelist Anne Tyler once applauded her "ability to pounce on the startlingly comic underside of the most hopeless situation."
"I am of the firm belief that everybody could write books, and I never understand why they don't," Bainbridge said in 1976. "After all, everyone speaks. Once the grammar has been learnt, it is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say."
"I write to make sense of my childhood experience," she told the Times in 1981. "Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood. So I go over it again and again."
Bainbridge was born in Liverpool. She died Thursday and is survived by two daughters, Jo-Jo Davies and Rudi Davies, and a son, Aaron Davies, and seven grandchildren.
