My mum, the author Mary Hooper, who has died aged 81, left school aged 15 with no qualifications. Her last school report said: “Far too noisy and talkative.” When she was a young mother in the 1970s she read a short story and thought “I could do better than that,” wrote one up and sent it to Jackie magazine. To her surprise, it sold for £14.

She went on to write hundreds of stories and more than 100 books for children and young adults, before YA was an official genre. Among them were Newes from the Dead (2008), which won teenage book of the year at the North East Book awards and Bank Street best children’s book of the year in 2009; Fallen Grace (2010), which was nominated for the Carnegie medal in 2011; and Poppy (2014), which won the Young Quills Historical Association award that year, nominated by young readers.

Mary was an only child, born in Barnes, south-west London, but, as she always said, before it became expensive and chi-chi. Her father, Robert Tapson, ran an antique shop in Hammersmith; her mother, Milly, died when Mary was in her 20s. She attributed her talkativeness and nosiness to being an only child, but later found these attributes were vital to her job as a writer. She was a mod in the 1960s, and as a young woman would go to the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, west London, where the Rolling Stones played some of their early gigs, and to live recordings of the pop show Ready Steady Go!.

She married Harry Hooper in the late 60s and worked as a secretary, during which time she learned how to touch-type. For my sister, Gemma, and me, the background noise of our childhood was the clatter of the typewriter as she bashed away. She started writing contemporary fiction for teenage girls – her first published title was Jodie, in 1978 – then switched to historical fiction and for many years was published by Bloomsbury.

She would find snippets about historical figures and build a novel around them – for example, in Newes from the Dead she wrote about a 17th-century woman, Anne Green, who had been hanged but who revived on the autopsy table. As a mature student she took a degree in English at Reading University in 1990. Mary also volunteered at the Missing Persons Helpline (now called Missing People), moved by the plight of people who had lost their loved ones.

Her marriage to Harry ended in divorce, and in 2006 she married Richard Tippett, and they settled in Henley-on-Thames. She delighted in her grandchildren, Mack, Nate, Molly and Iris, and played a close part in their care and upbringing.

In the 2010s she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and eventually had to give up writing. Her endurance of the disease was extraordinary.

She is survived by Richard, Gemma and me, and her grandchildren.