Maurice Leitch, the radio drama producer, dramatist, and author whose novel Poor Lazarus won the Guardian fiction prize in 1969, died September 26. He was 90. The Guardian reported that his first novel, The Liberty Lad (1965), anticipated the Troubles in Northern Ireland: "Though it is not overtly political, The Liberty Lad reflects the deteriorating social and moral climate in the fictional Protestant mill village of Kildargan, with its damp terrace houses, its industrial decline and prevailing sense of poverty and malaise, all complicated by sectarian undertones."
This was followed by Poor Lazarus (1969), Stamping Ground (1975), and Silver's City (1981), which won the Whitbread Prize, then eight more novels including his last, Gone to Earth (2019). He also wrote two collections of stories and a novella.
Among Leitch's radio plays, Flutes (1984) and A Shout in the Distance (1999) were among those set in Northern Ireland and broadcast on Radio 4. The radio dramatization of Silver's City (1995) starred Brian Cox and James Nesbit. For 12 years he was editor of Radio 4's Book at Bedtime. His TV plays included Guests of the Nation (1983), an adaptation of Frank O'Connor's short story, starring Timothy Spall.
The poet Michael Longley recalled traveling with Leitch, recording participants in an amateur talent program: "I was between jobs and worked briefly as Maurice's floor manager, the cheerleader for country-and-western songsters and backwoods comedians--characters who would have fitted into one of his marvelous Ulster-based novels."
In 1970 Leitch left Belfast for London, continuing to work for BBC radio as a drama producer, but he "never uprooted himself entirely from Antrim and Belfast, and a Northern Irish element found its way into most of his novels, even if it is just an exuberant Ulster couple heading for Wiltshire in a camper van, as in Burning Bridges (1989)," the Guardian wrote, adding: "While he had admirers in many other places, and in 1998 was appointed MBE, he was far from being a household name in his birthplace. Perhaps that was due to his abrasive approach to the ills of Northern Ireland--he was never averse to throwing a spanner in the works--and his outspoken knack for tackling difficult subjects head-on."