When the second Nato bomb hit, Eve-Ann Prentice thought she was dead. “I heard a phenomenal noise and thought it was the last thing I would hear on Earth,” she wrote afterwards in The Times. “I was thrown to the ground, but then amazed when the thick grey-black smoke cleared and I was still alive. Then came the sound of another jet. At the same instant I saw the wreckage of one of our cars. It was flattened.”

She cowered in a culvert for 30 minutes, hiding with a Portuguese journalist, another of the small group of Western correspondents in Kosovo to report on the Nato campaign at the height of the war in 1999. After 30 minutes they ventured out. She was lucky, escaping with only cuts and grazes to her legs, right arm and forehead. Her Serb driver had been killed.

She and the rest of the group were found by Serb conscripts hiding in the mountains around Prizren and driven to a barracks. Prentice described her astonishment at their hospitality: they fed and tended her, although she was reporting the Kosovo conflict to a country at war with Serbia.

Her death robs British journalism of a doughty, principled and brave reporter, whose own long fight against cancer always came second to her insistence on pursuing a story to the end. Last year, in great pain, she travelled to The Hague to testify for the defence at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. She was no apologist for the former Yugoslav dictator, but felt it important that the historical record of what happened in Kosovo was accurate. In one of her last dispatches, in March last year, she wrote an account of her six-hour meeting with him in his prison cell. She had smuggled in two croissants, and Milosevic, courteous but pale and clearly in poor health, offered her in return one of his Davidoff cigarettes. He insisted she read the 170-page indictment and was precise in her testimony on the incidents and dates mentioned.

“As I left, the white-haired deposed President gave me a stern, unsmiling nod,” Prentice wrote. “He did not seem a man to kill himself in custody, as Milan Babic, the indicted Croatian Serb leader, did last Monday, but I thought it quite possible that he would be found dead in his cell one day, and that conspiracy theories would then abound, especially in Belgrade.” Two weeks later, he was dead.

The Serbs knew that Prentice was one of the few British journalists who was ready to speak up for them, even in the dark days of the Milosevic regime. An intrepid reporter, she knew the Balkans well, and took a controversial decision to report from the Serbian side during the Kosovo war. But her fairness, balance and refusal to be a propaganda outlet won her widespread respect: her disappearance after the Nato attack was front-page news.

Eve-Ann Page was born in 1952, the daughter of the Labour MP for King’s Lynn, Derek Page, later ennobled as Lord Whaddon. A rebellious spirit was forged in a convent school, and in 1968, at 17, she began work at the Lincolnshire Free Press and Spalding Guardian, impressing her colleagues with her passion for the plight of farm labourers in tied cottages, her dedication to smoking and her ability to drink a pint of Elgood’s bitter in four and a half seconds.

After marrying and changing her name to Prentice, she moved to Bristol, worked in a teabag factory, joined a news agency and then became a reporter first for the Western Daily Press, and later for the Peterborough Evening Telegraph. She became a sub-editor on The Guardian foreign desk and, after more painful bouts with cancer, joined her husband Pat in China as an adviser to the new China Daily. It was not a success. The pair were too rebellious, refused to peddle the propaganda line and were finally expelled, after five months, when they asked awkward questions about an incident they witnessed when a drunk Sudanese diplomat killed a Chinese pedestrian.

Prentice went back to The Guardian, then to The Sunday Telegraph before becoming production editor on the new Sunday Correspondent. But the paper did not last. On its closure, she joined The Times — arriving at a time when the crisis in the Balkans, an area she knew well, was at its height. She became a diplomatic correspondent, and conquered her fear of flying by training to become a pilot herself. She travelled several times to Yugoslavia.

After the Kosovo war she had an emotional reunion with Goran, the field surgeon who had risked his life to save her during the Nato attack. During a night out in Belgrade, she was dragged from a boat that was capsizing in a Danube tributary. A few weeks later her clothes and shoes fell apart, eaten by the chemicals released into the river by the bombing. A book on her experiences — One Woman’s War — won praise in Britain and in the Balkans for its nuanced understanding of the events.

Prentice was a popular colleague. Her passions were various: Jameson whiskey, car rallying (she wrote about several gruelling expeditions), travel, earthy jokes and the various bohemian eccentrics she befriended. Though ill herself, she was selfless in helping her father through a long bout of MS, and was quick to see the joke, after he died, when she invited the vicar and undertaker home to discuss his funeral arrangements over tea. Inadvertently she fed them her father’s special biscuits laced with cannabis to ease his pain. The vicar, tactfully, had no comment afterwards.

She spent her last months in Drogheda, Ireland, cared for by her second husband, Aidan Morrin.

Eve-Ann Prentice, journalist, was born on August 11, 1952. She died of cancer on September 20, 2007, aged 55