AN OXFORD writer predicted to be one of the biggest authors in the UK has died of cancer.

Siobhan Dowd, who lived in West Oxford, died at Sobell House Hospice on Tuesday, August 21, aged 47.

Her best-known work was her teen/adult crossover book A Swift Pure Cry, which tells the story of a pregnant girl in Ireland in 1984.

A Swift Pure Cry won the Eilis Dillon award in Ireland for a first-time children's author, was nominated for the Guardian Children's Book Prize and short-listed for the Booktrust Teenage Fiction Prize and the Waterstones Children's Book Prize.

Ms Dowd was married to librarian Geoff Morgan and did not have any children.

Her neighbour Fiona Hedges said: "She was a lovely, bubbly sort of woman and we liked her very much.

"She wrote beautiful books which children really seemed to like very much.

"She was very friendly and had a lovely sense of humour and she and Geoff used to do amazing Christmas cards with CDs. We shall miss her."

Tributes to Ms Dowd have been left on her website www.siobhandowd.co.uk A statement read: "Siobhan passed away on Tuesday, August 21.

"She left behind a sad husband, her lovely family and many lovely books - some yet to be published. She gave the world so much and, did not take it with her."

She was the youngest of four girls and started writing poems, ghost stories and mystery stories at the age of seven, writing her first novel at the age of nine.

She had a degree in Classics from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, and an MA from Greenwich University.

In May, she was included in a list of the authors predicted to make a hit in the next few years compiled by bookseller Waterstones, after being nominated by publishers, editors and agents as one of the top 25 writers in the next quarter of a century.

Ms Dowd co-founded a programme which takes authors into schools in socially deprived areas, as well as prisons, young offenders' institutions and community projects.

Her second novel, The London Eye Mystery, was published in June and was launched in the London Eye, in the Capitals' South Bank.

Ms Dowd has two more books due to be published next year, Bog Child in February, and Solace of the Road at a date to be confirmed.