Author and award-winning journalist Nicola Barry has died after a long illness. She was 66.
Ms Barry, a graduate of St Andrews University, was a columnist on a number of Scotland’s leading newspapers.
She won 27 press awards and was named Columnist of the Year three years running at the Scottish and UK Press Awards.
Ms Barry was the daughter of two doctors and her grandfather, Sir Maurice Craig, was psychiatrist to Virginia Woolf and to the future King Edward VIII.
During her career as a newspaper columnist and features writer, Ms Barry was driven by a passion to help the underdog and she helped raise funds for orphaned Bosnian children through the charity Edinburgh Direct Aid.
In 2005, while working for a Sunday newspaper, she completed a degree in creative writing at Glasgow University and went on to write her autobiography, Mother’s Ruin.
Beginning with the words: “I was born drunk”, the book tells the harrowing story of a dysfunctional middle-class family which was utterly destroyed by alcohol.
Her parents were addicts and Ms Barry also fought her own battle against alcohol, a fight she won.
After the success of Mother’s Ruin, she went on to write a novel, Fat? So!, which delves into a subject that haunts millions of women – their weight.
Before she became ill, she was researching her second novel, Relative Strangers.
Her creative writing tutor at Glasgow, Professor Willy Maley, described Ms Barry as a fine writer with an amazing life story.
“Nicola’s big-hearted personality, infectious smile and irrepressible humour hid the fact that she had had a hard time growing up and as a young woman in a man’s newspaper world she’d had to deal with all kinds of demons, some of them in shirts and ties,” he said.
Ms Barry is survived by her husband Alastair Murray and his daughters, Jane and Hazel.
Her funeral takes place at Warriston Crematorium, Edinburgh, on Tuesday January 31 at 1pm.
This will be followed by a service of thanksgiving at Colinton Parish Church at 2.15pm.
