Gordon Snell, the children’s author, journalist and husband of the late Maeve Binchy, has died aged 93.
He published his first book for children, The King of Quizzical Island, in 1978, following it up with Amy’s Wonderful Nest, Tina and the Tooth Fairy and The Supermarket Ghost, among others.
He met Binchy in the 1970s, when she was appointed to the London office of The Irish Times. The pair married in 1977 and moved to Ireland in the early 1980s. Binchy died in 2012; the couple had no children.
Snell was born in 1932 in Singapore, where his father worked as a surveyor. In 1942 his mother brought him to Australia to settle him into boarding school. She had intended to return to Singapore almost immediately but could not do so after the Japanese invasion began.
Snell did a degree at Oxford, then became a radio-studio manager at what is now the BBC World Service.
Maeve Binchy and Gordon Snell in 1991. Photograph: Ian Cook//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
After moving to Ireland he wrote scripts for RTÉ, including for the popular children’s show Wanderly Wagon.
In 2009 Binchy revealed that Snell had had a heart-bypass operation.
In a 2023 Irish Times interview with the writer Henrietta McKervey, Snell said: “Maeve and I always said we were very lucky, first to have met each other but also that we realised we were lucky. It’s one of the most important things.”