B. S. Johnson, who was found dead at his home in Islington on November 13, 1973, was one of the most naturally gifted writers of his generation. He was also one of the very small number to commit himself whole-heartedly to the experimental presentation of fiction. His Albert Angelo (1964) included carefully holed pages in order that readers might choose for themselves the order in which they received the writer’s words; The Unfortunates (1969) carried the pursuit of disintegration further by being printed and boxed in interchangeable sections. Throughout his career he believed that to adhere to the disciplines of conventional form was to risk the distortion of truth.

Brian Stanley Johnson was born in 1933, educated at King’s College, London, published his first novel, Travelling People in 1963 and his first collection of poetry a year later. Over the next decade he produced a prolific and vigorous body of work, including six further fictions, three films for the cinema and eight for television. His third, Trawl, won the Somerset Maugham Award for 1967; his film You’re Human Like the Rest of Them won the Grand Prix at both the Tours and Melbourne Festivals in 1968. In the teeth of distinguished competition he was appointed First Gregynog Arts Fellow at the University of Wales in 1970.

He was a combative but immensely likeable man. To meet him was to feel, as did most of his English admirers, that his natural gifts and his chosen method of using them were in perpetual conflict with one another; his sensibility remained a traditional one, and the influences that shaped him and recur in his work - a wartime childhood, a passion for football, an acute sense of the working life - were those that shaped many of his English contemporaries.

He was interested in and always concerned to communicate the common experience, editing two anthologies - The Evacuees (1968) and All Bull:The National Servicemen (1973). The descriptions of fishgutting in Trawl, of teaching in Albert Angelo, and the factory scenes in Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry (1973) achieve a high quality of observation and poetic immediacy; but the devices by which he seeks to defuse and intellectualize their impact produce a sense of irresolution and leave the reader hungry for more.

His later books, Christie Malry and House Mother Normal (1971) were as good and funny as anything he wrote, and one could say of him, as of few writers at 40, that his talents might still have taken him anywhere.