Gordon Burn, who has died of bowel cancer aged 61, was best-known for his books on serial killers, notably the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and Gloucester couple Fred and Rosemary West.

But was he was also a leading art critic, an award-winning journalist and a writer on topics from celebrity to snooker and football.

A working class Geordie, he became a close friend of Damien Hirst, collaborated with the artist on two books and, like Hirst, flitted through the London art party scene.

Burn was fascinated with celebrity, its coverage in the media and what it does to those he considered its "victims" - "celebrities" themselves.

"Almost everything I have written," he once said, "has been about celebrity, and how for most people celebrity is a kind of death."

Entranced by the non-fiction crime novels of American writers Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, Burn aspired to get inside the head of serial killer Sutcliffe.

He spent two years living and immersing himself in the murderer's hometown, Bingley in Yorkshire, before publishing his first book, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, in 1984 to widespread acclaim.

In 1986, he published Pocket Money, a brilliantly-observant insight into the world of professional snooker.

His first novel Alma Cogan (1991), a fictional fantasy about the continuing life of the popular 1950s singer had she not died young, won the Whitbread prize for best first novel. In 1995 came his novel Fullalove, about a sleazy tabloid journalist, before he returned to the theme of serial killers with his Happy Like Murderers (1998), the grisly story of the Wests.

Best and Edwards, a comparison of the curtailed lives of Manchester United greats George Best and Duncan Edwards, was well received in 2006 and he published his last book, Born Yesterday, to fine reviews last year.

Brian Donaldson wrote in The Herald: "It's a literary cocktail of postmodern novel, experimental autobiography, social essay and historical reportage that covers the traumas and tribulations of Britain's summer of 2007, featuring catastrophic floods, terror attacks on Glasgow, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and the public evaporation of Tony Blair to make way for Gordon Brown."

Gordon Burn was born an only child in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on January 16, 1948.

His father was a paint-sprayer in a car bodyshop, his mother worked in the city's Binns department store and the family lived on one floor of a small house with an outside toilet. (Years later, after his success, he hyped his working class street cred by saying his mother had been a cleaner, something that brought her to tears).

After attending Rutherford Grammar School in Newcastle, where he was often teased for the amount of books he read, he got a degree in Sociology from the Birmingham College of Commerce (now Aston University).

As a teenager, he was close to his cousin, Eric Burdon, who shot to fame in 1964 as lead singer of The Animals.

"To know someone who was on the telly and in the papers made it seem that the world wasn't just an abstract, but it was possible to get into it somehow," he told The Herald in last August's interview before the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Although he kick-started his career in journalism by sending a feature to The Guardian, his contacts with Burdon - including during a summer in Los Angeles - gave him access to pop stars which led to work for Rolling Stone and eventually The Sunday Times magazine, Esquire and others. His Esquire articles on sport brought him Britain's Columnist of the Year award in 1991.

Gordon Burn, who spent his time latterly between homes in Chelsea and Northumberland, is survived by his partner of nearly 40 years, the artist Carol Gorner. He had no children.

PHIL DAVISON