The London dramatist, poet and novelist and has died aged 97

Bernard Kops was a prolific playwright, poet and novelist. He was part of that extraordinary generation of Anglo-Jewish writers born in the 1920s and 30s that included Dannie Abse, Elaine Feinstein, Jack Rosenthal, Bernice Rubens, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker. As Mike Leigh once joked in an article for JR, it was a time when all the leading Jewish playwrights were called Harold, Arnold or Bernard.

Kops was born on 28 November 1926 in London’s East End, the youngest of eight children of Dutch Jewish immigrants, Joel (a tailor) and Ginny Kops. Relatives left behind in Amsterdam were killed by the Nazis. He grew up in poverty. "Everyone was starving in those days before the war," he once said. "Because we were so poor, every day was a battle. My whole life was a drama."

In 1957 his first play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green, was produced at the Oxford Playhouse, one of the key works of the 'New Wave' in British drama along with Look Back in Anger, The Wesker Trilogy and Pinter’s early plays. He once said in an interview, "We brought our backgrounds, our experiences and our traditions… An authenticity came and wiped away the middle-class, like [Terence] Rattigan – a marvellous writer, but the audiences didn't want that any more."

The 1960s and 70s were a productive time for Kops, from his memoir The World is a Wedding (1963) to his novel On Margate Sands (1978). But this was also a dark period in his life. He suffered from drug addiction and in 1975 attempted suicide. He wrote about this time and his rehabilitation in one of his best works, Shalom Bomb: Scenes from My Life (2000).

"Family," he once said, "is the sustaining force. My life is dissected into all the concerns and joys of the family." He was married to his wife Erica for almost 70 years. Without her, he told the Jewish Chronicle, "I could not have survived". He is survived by Erica and their four children, Adam, Hannah, Rebekah and Abigail.

By David Herman