TRIBUTES have been paid to a North-East novelist who won the Booker prize for his story about the 18th Century slave trade.

Barry Unsworth, who was born in Wingate, County Durham, has died, aged 81, in the Umbria region of Italy, where he lived for many years.

He shared the 1992 Booker prize with English Patient author Michael Ondaatje, for his novel Sacred Hunger, in which a ship’s doctor leads a rebellion on an 18th Century slave ship.

Jocasta Hamilton, publishing director of Hutchinson, said: “Barry’s work was characterised by a willingness to tackle big subjects with great humanity.

“His writing bought enormous pleasure as well as being thought-provoking and illuminating.”

He was born in 1930, and from an early age, wanted to be a writer.

His father, an ex-miner turned insurance salesman, moved the family regularly.

In an interview with The Northern Echo in 1992, he said that Stockton, where he attended grammar school, was not the best place from where to pursue a literary career. He said: “If you wore suede shoes or carried an umbrella, you were seen as a little odd in those days. It wasn’t a good place for a sensitive chap, though I am sure things are better now.”

In the mid-1950s, after his National Service, which he hated, he and his brother shared the £1,800 from the sale of their late parents’ house, in Norton.

Mr Unsworth left for Cornwall, where he rented a remote cottage and wrote scores of short stories, which he sent to a London agency – only to have them all returned as unusable.

He then got drunk and burnt the lot.

Instead, he found himself several years later teaching for the British Council in Greece, where he was encouraged in his creative writing by a professor who said his complicated ideas may find better expression in a novel.

He followed that advice, sent his novel, The Partnership, to a company that specialised in first novels and had it accepted. It was published in 1966.

Much of his life since then has been spent in the Eastern Mediterranean, Other books he wrote were: Pascali’s Island, shortlisted for the 1980 Booker Prize; Stone Virgin (1985); Morality Play, shortlisted for the 1995 Booker Prize; Losing Nelson (1999); The Songs of the Kings (2002); The Ruby in Her Navel (2006); and Land of Marvels (2009).

The Quality of Mercy, published last autumn, is due in paperback in Windmill, in September. Hutchinson is reissuing Stone Virgin and Losing Nelson in September.