Author and journalist

Born April 27, 1950

Died: January 20, 2017

NICOLA Barry, who has died aged 66, was a journalist and author who won numerous newspaper industry awards for her work as a columnist for the Herald and many other titles, and as a features writer and social affairs commentator. A spectacularly good writer, she boasted 27 press awards including Columnist of the Year three years in a row in the Scottish and UK Press Awards.

Intelligent and effervescent, she came from a privileged background. Her father, Claude Barry, was a consultant anaesthetist at the Western General in Edinburgh while her mother, Monica Craig who had been a debutante and was presented at Court, retired from medicine when they married. Nicola’s grandfather, Sir Maurice Craig was psychiatrist to Virginia Woolf for 22 years, and to the future King Edward VIII, and is widely recognised as a pioneer in the treatment of mental illness.

She was educated and boarded at the Holy Family convent school in Littlehampton, Sussex, and graduated from St Andrews University.

During her career as a newspaper columnist and features writer, Nicola Barry was always driven by a passion to help the underdog, to give a voice to those who had none. She had a wry, self-deprecating personality, free of affectation, and was passionate about children’s issues.

She wrote about women’s issues too, bemoaning the approach of politicians to “winning over” women voters to independence, for instance: “In Scotland, women are seen as a ‘problem’ group; tantamount to people with special needs,” Barry wrote. “This strategy distracts attention from the gender hierarchies which exist in all our political parties… The big question is: why are so many women turning their backs on politics? Could it possibly be because politics has turned its back on them?”

Her mentor and guiding light was a nun who ran a charity in Edinburgh. She helped and supported Sister Margaret Duncan, who worked tirelessly for Edinburgh Direct Aid in Leith, to raise funds for orphaned and disabled Bosnian children.

In 2005 she completed an MPhil in Creative Writing at Glasgow University, going on to write her autobiography, Mother’s Ruin, which was published in 2007 by Headline. Beginning with the words: “I was born drunk”, the book tells the harrowing story of a dysfunctional middle-class family who were utterly destroyed by alcohol. Barry’s own parents were addicts, a battle which she herself fought and eventually came through.

Professor Willy Maley, was her tutor on the creative writing course: “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. “ She started writing a wickedly funny account of her experience of her first job and male-dominated tabloid culture but dug deeper and shifted to recounting her childhood and her struggle with alcoholism – her parents’ then her own.”

“Nicola found comfort later in life with her beloved Alastair and her equally beloved Scottie dog, Jura. She was a fantastic friend, not just a former student.”

Nicola Barry went on to write a novel. Fat? So! tells the story of a television presenter who, despite being beautiful and hugely successful, is permanently preoccupied with losing weight. She persuades her best friend, who is chronically obese, to join her in having drastic bariatric surgery. The consequences are as horrendous as they are shocking and unexpected.

Before she became seriously ill, Nicola Barry was researching her second novel about warring sisters, called Relative Strangers. Tributes to have poured in from former colleagues and friends in newspaper offices in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh.

Nicola Barry is survived by her husband, Alastair Murray and his daughters, Jane and Hazel.

BILL HEANEY