DAVID HUGHES was an elegant and original writer best known as a novelist. The Pork Butcher (1984), a fictional account of a Nazi atrocity in a village near Limoges, won the W H Smith prize for literature and was made into a film. He wrote ten other novels as well as a number of works of nonfiction which included The Road to Stockholm (1964) and The Seven Ages of England (1966). He aimed for perfection, and critics admired the precision, humour and inventiveness of his short works.

David John Hughes was born in Hampshire in 1930, the only son of Fielden Hughes, a headmaster and writer. After National Service in the RAF, he read English at Christ Church, Oxford, where he edited Isis, and was spotted by the editor of the London Magazine, John Lehmann. After two years working for Lehmann as an editorial assistant, he took a job as a reader for the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis. Hughes became restless improving other people’s work, so he was given half a day a week off in which to write. His first novel, A Feeling in the Air, published in 1957, was quickly followed by another two.

About this time Hughes was introduced to the Swedish actress and director Mai Zetterling, a highly intelligent and attractive woman with striking blue eyes. They were married in 1958. The couple moved — with Zetterling’s two children from her first marriage — into a house in Berry Grove in Hampshire, where Hughes built a shed to write in.

After editing the magazine Town for a year in 1960, Hughes moved with his family to Sweden where Zetterling got on with directing and Hughes with writing: he produced The Horsehair Sofa (1961), The Major (1964) and The Man who Invented Tomorrow (1968), and two books of non-fiction. He and his wife wrote a children’s book together, and he was also heavily involved in a number of her projects, working as a scriptwriter and photographer.

But Hughes was finding it more and more difficult to write and, after a period living in France, near Nîmes, they returned to England. They divorced, and Hughes moved to London. That year he published Memories of Dying (1976). It was the first of a number of successful novels. The Imperial German Dinner Service, a meditation on love which took the quest for the dispersed pieces of a Wedgwood dinner service as its plot, was published in 1983; and But for Bunter, in which he presented Billy Bunter as significantly influential in shaping the 20th century, in 1985.

It was The Pork Butcher, published in 1984, that brought Hughes’s work to a national readership. It sold very well, and the film based on it, Souvenir, which starred Christopher Plummer as the butcher, came out in 1989. Many people — including Hughes, who cried when he saw it — thought that it had bastardised the original.

The Little Book, which had a strong autobiographical element, appeared in 1996, also to great critical acclaim. In it a British novelist in his sixties, who has had a kidney removed and been told that he has little time to live, fantasises about writing a small book, a “book to end books”, which will take only an hour to read, but will inspire through its exploration of love, death and the wasting of life. A. N. Wilson called it “a superbly skilful piece of literary surrealism”, and Philip Hensher, “perfect”.

Among his later works were Himself and Other Animals, (1997), a memoir of his friend Gerald Durrell, The Lent Jewels (2002), a biography of A. C. Tait, a 19th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, which focused on the deaths of his children, and The Hack’s Tale (2004), in which he reflected on the damaging power exercised by the media, and identified as the source of it Chaucer, Froissart and Boccaccio.

Hughes wrote film reviews for The Sunday Times in 1982-83 and book and theatre reviews for The Mail on Sunday between 1982 and 1999.

He also edited the New Fiction Society’s magazine from 1975 to 1978, and edited the annual Best Short Stories from 1986 to 1995 with Giles Gordon. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and from 1989 he served for seven years on its council. He was elected a vice-president in 1998. He was a visiting Professor of Writing at the universities of Iowa, Alabama and Houston.

In his last years he was a contributor to The Spectator and The Oldie. He was a clubbable man, with a light and witty touch in conversation, and many friends. He is survived by his second wife, Elizabeth, and by their son and daughter.

David Hughes, writer, was born on July 27, 1930. He died on March 14, 2005, aged 74.