The first time I met Dawn Foster, who has died at the age of thirty-four, she chatted to my then-one-year-old daughter like she was an old friend, and was thrilled when she found out they shared the same September birthday. We were staying at the same fancy hotel in Bristol for work, and we had arranged to meet for breakfast after I’d sent her an email to tell her how glad I was to see someone writing from a left-wing, working-class perspective in national media. It was all a bit incongruous — the bleary middle-aged parents and the tall young woman whose startling blue-green eyes twinkled when she nipped off for a ciggie — but I knew we’d made a friend when she carried on merrily chatting about mutual friends and irritants while having bits of boiled egg thrown at her from across the table. (And that was just my husband — badoom-tish — which is exactly what I’d text her now if she were here.)

From that point on, my daughter’s birthday was also “Dawn’s birthday” — we’d send her a card reminding her of the double celebration. Not that she needed reminding. She loved children, and she loved people in general — because of, rather than in spite of, her experiences, it always seemed to me. In the six short years we knew each other, I came to know enough about what she had been through in childhood and adolescence to find not only her resilience but her total lack of self-pity a source of wonder and succor. She wanted not just to survive but to thrive in the life she made for herself.

She did this by choosing to harness her anger as a source of positive energy: not only for herself but for everyone who needed it. Her background wasn’t just working-class, it was in many ways truly marginal: disrupted and disheveled by periods spent in care, changes of school, and domestic experiences so malign they might have destroyed her. Above all, her milieu was one of hardship. Even as her writing career took off, she worked her way around poverty rather than out of it, all the while knowing she was likely to be in debt from student loans for most of her life. For this reason, she never let go of the insight that much of her early suffering had been avoidable. She never got comfortable enough to forget that poverty is a political choice inflicted by those who don’t live in it.