In 1997, while in Kraków, Poland, researching his first novel, Underground, the poet and author Tobias Hill, who has died of glioblastoma aged 53, spotted an antique watch that caught his attention for its simplicity and beauty. Although it cost more than he could reasonably afford he bought it and later took it to the makers, Patek Philippe, who told him it had a postwar casing on a much older watch.
This discovery led to uneasy questions, largely prompted by Kraków’s history during the second world war: who might have owned the older watch and who had it re-cased after and why. From these questions arose Tobias’s second novel, The Love of Stones (2001), which brought together the stories of a contemporary jewel dealer in London, Katherine Sterne, and two Iraqi-Jewish brothers who arrived in London in 1833 and set up a jewellery business. That vignette encapsulates much about Tobias’s writing: his instinct for what is worth paying attention to; his inquiring mind that wanted to look beneath the surface of beauty to find something layered and intriguing; his attention to the sorrows and violence of history; and the way in which he wandered the world imaginatively and literally, but almost inevitably returned to London.
It was not just his fiction that so often had London at its heart. Both his final novel, What Was Promised (2014), and his poetry collection Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow (2006), use the same Ralph Waldo Emerson quote as epigraph: “Cities give us collision”. He was interested in all manner of collision that occurred in his native city: the collision of different characters, of different histories, of different scents and tastes, of the natural world and the human-made world.
This last preoccupation may have been part of the reason he was chosen to be poet-in-residence at London Zoo in 1998, an experience that led to the collection Zoo that same year. It would be inaccurate, though, to claim London held all his work together – there were poems that drew on his two years living in Japan, and a novel (The Hidden, 2009) set on an archaeological dig in Greece.
The defining characteristics of his work are not to be found in place but in the lyrical precision of his language and his careful attention to structure. These were both qualities that he saw as tying his fiction to his poetry. Although he was perhaps best known for the novels, he saw himself as a poet first, and said that if he could have earned a living entirely from poetry he would never have written fiction.
There are few writers whose new novels I waited for with greater anticipation, but I can see the value of having more Tobias Hill poetry out in the world, shifting our view of, for instance, the inside of a horse chestnut, in the 2006 poem of the same name:
Hold tight. There’s good in us, as there is
inside the sharp, green hulls of the chestnuts
which open as we tread them underfoot,
halving to reveal themselves, not cold,
or spent, but bright as bloody, beating hearts.
Born in Kentish Town, north London, Tobias was the son of Caroline (nee Berman), a book designer, and George Hill, a journalist on the Times. His interest in London and its collisions may have had its origins in his parents’ backgrounds: George came from a family of farmers and brewers who were “very English” and Caroline’s parents were of German-Jewish origin. Tobias was particularly interested in his mother’s side of the family, and thought of himself as Jewish, though he never practised.
He and his sister, Amelia, grew up in a bookish household where their interest in the arts was always encouraged and fed. He started to write poetry when he was at school and, more typically for a child of the 80s, was passionate about the role-player game Dungeons and Dragons, which he played as a young boy and again as an adult. He studied at Hampstead comprehensive school in Cricklewood and at the University of Sussex, where he graduated with a degree in English in 1992.
Tobias had his first five books published in the space of five years before he turned 30, a feat even more startling for spanning three different forms: the poetry collections Year of the Dog (1995), Midnight in the City of Clocks (1996) and Zoo (1998); the short story collection Skin (1997); and the novel Underground (1999). His third novel, The Cryptographer (2003), led AS Byatt to describe him as “one of the two or three most original and interesting young novelists working in Britain today”. The following year he was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award and selected as one of the 20 Next Generation poets by the Poetry Book Society, alongside writers such as Alice Oswald, Patience Agbabi and Robin Robertson.
The pace of his output slowed down, by his standards, in the next decade, during which he produced some of his strongest work in both fiction and poetry. Away from writing, life was busy: marriage in 2003 to Hannah Donat, who is artistic producer of the Proms; a position in 2009 as the inaugural programme director at Faber Academy, followed in 2012 by a senior lecturer role at Oxford Brookes University’s MA in creative writing; and, also that year, the birth of a son, Kit.
In 2014, shortly before the publication of What Was Promised, Tobias had a stroke. Thereafter, he was unable to write poetry and fiction, but he continued to be generous, curious and interested in people and their stories. He kept up with the news and politics, watched countless films, maintained his love for a wide range of music from Benjamin Britten to Otis Redding, and took pleasure in caring for Kit. He also continued to play Dungeons and Dragons with old friends.
He is survived by Hannah, Kit, Caroline and Amelia.
• Tobias Fleet Hill, poet and author, born 30 March 1970; died 26 August 2023
