Writer; Born May 14, 1922; Died March 29, 2009. AMY Baumann, who has died aged 87 following a stroke, was a novelist, poet and author of A Valley Wide, the recently published memoir about her life in a remote part of Ibiza in the early 1960s.
Baumann was delighted with the response to her memoir when it was published by Ibiza's Barbary Press for the first time last November, 45 years after she finished it.
A Valley Wide records the triumphs and misadventures of the three-year stay in San Vicente - getting to know locals, teaching the children, exploring the bay and alluring countryside, making ends meet, and numerous local traditions on the verge of disappearing. It also describes the construction of the asphalt road which linked this remote valley with the outside world.
The translation into Spanish by Eva Maria Rios Castillo also gave her great pleasure. "The books arrived today, and I'm delighted!" she wrote to the publisher. "I've kept getting immersed in both versions, to the neglect of daily tasks. As you say, it's been a long wait, but well worth it - thanks for your confidence and tenacity."
She also wrote children's novels and translations under the name Alexis Brown, and poetry (the collection Special Occasions was published by Windfall Press in 2008) under her own name. She had a strong and abiding concern for social justice, peace and anti-racism.
Amy Baumann (nee Brown) was born in Wellington, Shropshire, in 1922. During the Second World War she served in the Women's Land Army and subsequently trained and worked as a teacher.
In the late 1950s she settled on the small Balearic island of Formentera with her husband, the poet/historian Jack Beeching (who died in 2001) and their two children, moving on to San Vicente in Ibiza several years later. She wrote two adventure novels for children, Treasure in Devils' Bay (1962, also published in Dutch) and Schooner on the Rocks (1966), and translated various books from Spanish, Dutch and German, including Alexander Exquemelin's The Buccaneers of America.
In the late 1970s she moved to Fife, where she worked for 10 years at the Scottish Fisheries Museum. Last year she settled in Wigtown, where her daughter runs one of the many second-hand bookshops that have made the place known to book-lovers from all over the world.
Baumann is survived by her daughter Laura ("Flora" in A Valley Wide) and her son John ("Peter"), as well as numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
There will be no funeral as she bequeathed her body to medical research, but the family hope to hold a memorial walk on Cambo beach in Fife, her favourite walk, where the family remembered her husband Henry Baumann after his death.
MARTIN DAVIES
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