My friend Ann Prior, who has died aged 66 of cancer, was driven to live a simple and impressively resourceful life. She was a cook, author, artist and adventurer. She was fiercely independent and cared deeply about the destructive impact of humans on the environment, long before it arrived in the national consciousness.
Ann shunned any employment that might lead to her feeling trapped, and allowed her desire to live near the sea to influence the ways in which she made her living. She inherited her love and knowledge of food from her mother, and refined her skills to become an excellent cook. She relished making a meal out of chance ingredients, her stated favourite being nettles.
With her friend Bo Simmons, Ann bought and ran Burrastow House in Shetland, which was almost immediately recommended in the Good Food Guide. However, the job of seasonal cook for the RSPB Fair Isle bird observatory was to become her chosen employment for much of the following 30 years, to the delight of both staff and visitors.
Ann was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, to Mary and Arthur Prior. In 1959 Arthur got a job as a professor of philosophy at the University of Manchester and the family emigrated to the UK. When Ann arrived at Withington school at the age of nine, she was already an accomplished writer, a remarkable artist and a great reader.
When her father became a don at Balliol College, Oxford, Ann started at Oxford high school, which is where I met her. Her arrival in our sixth form was heralded by the news that the new girl had a published novel: The Sky Cage (1967). A sequel soon followed: Mirror Image (1969). From the proceeds of her books, Ann bought a narrowboat, Medusa, which was moored near Oxford and in which she lived while studying English at St Hugh’s College.
Ann was drawn to boats – and islands. Her family had sailed to Britain via Pitcairn and Curaçao, and years later, during the 1990s, she set foot on Ascension and St Helena on the way to the Falkland Islands to cook in hotels and on ships. She met Ken Passfield, a marine officer, and together they sailed among remote islands. For many years Ann chose to live in perpetual summer, alternating her employment between the northern and southern hemispheres – between Shetland and the islands of the South Atlantic. During a period as postmistress for South Georgia, she assisted with bird-related projects and, with Ken, explored deserted whaling stations against a background of battling elephant seals and nesting albatross.
As an artist, she painted florid frescoes of voluptuous men and women on ceilings in Oxford while a student; most recently she produced watercolour landscapes of St Kilda.
Ann is survived by her older brother, Martin.
