BERNICE RUBENS was one of Britain’s most successful postwar novelists. Her The Elected Member was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1970, a year in which the other shortlisted writers included Iris Murdoch, William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen. She was shortlisted for the prize in 1978 for A Five Year Sentence. She won the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Kingdom Come (1990), and she won the Arts Council of Wales Literature Award three times.

Two of her novels were made into films: in 1981 I Sent a Letter to my Love with Simone Signoret and Jean Rochefort; and in 1988 Madame Sousatzka with Shirley MacLaine. Her book Mr Wakefield’s Crusades (1985) was turned into a television mini-series.

In her career she wrote 25 novels, and since 1990 she wrote at the rate of nearly one a year. At the time of her death she had also finished a first draft of her memoirs.

Despite her critical and commercial success, Rubens always said that she had fallen into her literary career by chance. She had never had any desire to be a writer, and it was only when she was in her thirties and both her daughters had started school that she thought she would “have a go”.

Her first book — written in longhand and in one draft — found a publisher immediately and received good reviews. “It was luck,” she told a newspaper interviewer. “If things had not gone so smoothly, I would have stopped writing and tried something else.” While claiming that she did not even particularly enjoy writing, she said: “I like having written. I like having ideas — I can have them when I’m in bed or something, nowhere near my desk.”

Bernice Rubens was born in Cardiff in 1928. Her father was a Russian Jew who had emigrated to Britain from Latvia at the turn of the century. Finding himself a refugee in Hamburg, he had bought a ticket which he thought would get him to America, but in fact it landed him in Wales.

Rubens was the third of four children and their family was closeknit. The significance of familial relations was a recurring theme in her books. While growing up she was surrounded by music and musicians. She played in a string quartet with her sister and two brothers right up to the death of her younger brother, Cyril, in 1996 — a loss that affected her deeply.

Unlike her siblings, Rubens did not choose music for a profession, although not for lack of talent. The family owned two violins which her father had bought shortly before he left Latvia, and they had been passed from one sibling to another. But little Bernice wanted to play the cello. Since the family could not afford one, she had to wait until she was 17 before she could start to learn, by which time it was too late to become a professional musician. She did, however, become a serious amateur, playing in several orchestras and chamber groups, and music-making was a lifelong passion.

Rubens read English literature at Unversity College, Cardiff, where she was president of both the Socialist and the Music societies. She graduated in 1947, soon married Rudi Nassauer and began teaching at Birmingham. She gave up teaching when her children were born, and had no immediate reason to resume making a living when they were older — “I was being supported, as a nice Jewish girl usually is,” she explained.

Her husband had published a novel, and by the early 1960s Rubens herself began to write. She also felt that documentary film-making was a medium which had the potential to do much good. She got a job in a laboratory as a cleaner of film spool in order to get a technician’s credit. This qualification meant that she could begin to make films herself, and she specialised in humanitarian subjects such as mentally handicapped children, children in care and the blind.

Eventually she won a contract with Granada and then the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. The latter meant that she could travel all over the world, and she chose to go to Asia and Africa in order to make a film about women in rural development. In 1968 she was awarded the American Blue Ribbon award for the documentary film Stress.

Initially, she alternated between novels and films, then the writing took over: “So I made a film, wrote a book, made a film, wrote a book,” she said, “and then there were no films any more, and nobody knocked on my door, it just evaporated.”

Rubens enjoyed making films, she said, but films did not let you “take the final responsibility” as books did. A film could be the work of the director or the editor or the cameraman, she said, but a book was all the work of its writer.

Certainly her Jewishness was a defining influence in her writing and in her life. Her family was one of some 600 which formed the Orthodox Jewish community in Cardiff. Several of her books have specifically Jewish themes; including Brothers (1983), where the parallels with her own ancestry are obvious — it follows four generations of a family which flees Russia for South Wales. “It has bits of my father, my grandfather and my brothers in it. It’s my best book, because it matters. What it’s about matters.”

Rubens’s most recent book, The Sergeants’ Tale (2003), is based on the deaths of two British soldiers, killed as part of a reprisal for the execution of three members of the Jewish National Military Organisation, Irgun, who had been captured while helping comrades to escape from prison in 1947. She fictionalised the characters but the actual event was etched into her memory; “The story has been nagging me for years,” she told an interviewer. “Then I thought now is the time to write it because of what is happening in Israel. The conflict there is still a source of great anxiety.”

Coming from a family with firmly Zionist views, her sympathies always remained firmly with Israel, although in the book she avoided political bias and concentrated instead on the human aspects of the novel.

Her attitude to conflict was firmly based in her more general conclusions about human nature: “The victims change, but the scapegoat neurosis is constant. Man has the need for it, for envy, jealousy.”

Rubens’s humanitarian concerns manifested themselves in her association with the English Centre of International PEN, the worldwide association of writers which campaigns against the institutional persecution and imprisonment of writers all over the world, for which she was a vice-president, and Amnesty International.

She was made a fellow of her old university, now called Cardiff University, in 1982 and she received an honorary DLitt from the University of Wales in 1992.

After two decades of marriage she divorced her husband, who died in 1996. Rubens is survived by her two daughters.

Bernice Rubens, novelist, was born on July 26, 1928. She died of a stroke on October 13, 2004, aged 76.