This is taken from The Times, April 26, 2006:

June Knox-Mawer
May 10, 1930 - April 19, 2006
Adventurous and much-travelled writer and broadcaster who shone as a presenter of BBC's Woman's Hour

A SPIRITED, direct personality, both as a broadcaster and on the personal level, June Knox-Mawer was one of the most recognisable voices on radio from the 1970s onwards, notably as a presenter of the BBC’s popular magazine programme Woman’s Hour.

Welsh born, she had begun her professional life in the late 1940s as a journalist in Cheshire, but after marrying her husband Ronald Knox-Moore, also a Welshman and then a barrister on the Wales and Chester Circuit, later to be a writer and broadcaster himself, she accompanied him abroad in various judicial postings, to Aden and the South Sea islands.

This experience gave her the material for a number of the books she subsequently published: travel diaries, histories, historical novels and exotic romances.

She brought to her duties as the wife of a magistrate in Britain’s overseas possessions and protectorates the zest that came naturally to her, and this was reflected in her lively writings, both fact and fiction.

She was born June Ellis in Wrexham in 1930, and after going to school locally, began her working life as a trainee journalist on the Chester Chronicle in 1947. After three years as a reporter based in Chester, in 1951 she married Knox-Mawer, a neighbour from childhood days.

Their lives were soon to be transformed when, in 1952 he was appointed Chief Magistrate and Acting Chief Justice in Aden, where he was to remain for six years. She revelled in the life there, never content with what was available in the mandarin milieu around Government House.

Unable to restrain her natural curiosity and ebullience, she was soon making friends with Arabs — and their womenfolk — and making unorthodox journeys off the beaten track. The experience was put to good use in her travel diary, The Sultans Came to Tea (1961).

By that time her husband had been sent, in 1958, as Senior Magistrate, Puisne Judge, Justice of Appeal and Acting Chief Justice of Fiji. He combined these offices with that of Joint Chief Justice for Nauru and Tonga, a portfolio of magistracies involving, for Fiji alone, 300 islands scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean.

The scene was set for much travel to attend a multitude of ceremonies and celebrations all over this vast archipelago, and June Knox-Mawer brought these vividly alive in A Gift of Islands (1965). This compared her own observations as the wife of a judge of the contemporary Fijian justiciary in a peaceful era with those of two indomitable Victorian lady travellers of a century before, who faced, quite apart from the natural hazards of ocean travel in a previous age, such horrors as cannibalism and ritual murder.

In 1971 the Knox-Mawers returned to Britain where he served for five years on the Northern Circuit. They then moved to London where he was Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate and a Deputy Circuit Judge until 1984, after which he began to write prolifically.

In the meantime she had continued to publish. A World of Islands, a history, appeared in 1968, and was followed by Marama, a historical novel, in 1968. A South Sea Spell, a lively diary of the Fiji and Tonga sojourn, composed much after the style of The Sultans Came to Tea, appeared in 1976.

For her romantic novel Sandstorm (1991), June Knox-Mawer returned to the Arab milieu, not Aden at a time of political tension but the Arabia of before the First World War. Its heroine, the ingénue Rose, travels to the country where she falls in love with a man whom she imagines to be a dashing diplomat, only to discover that he is a drunken brute. Repelled, she finds love with the teetotal Emir Hassan. Sandstorm, erotic without being explicit, won for its author the Boots romantic novel of the year prize for 1992.

For a number of years the Knox-Mawers divided their lives between their London flat at the top of a tall house near Marble Arch and their Welsh cottage perched up the side of a mountain in a remote part of Denbighshire. The latter, to which they eventually retired, was evocatively described in her book A Ram in the Well. This was an account not merely of “taking on” a dwelling which included, in addition to the ram of the title, a swarm of bees in the bedroom chimney, but also of a vanishing Welsh rural life. It was published in 2004.

Besides her familiar presence over a number of years on Woman’s Hour, Knox-Mawer wrote and presented numerous radio documentary programmes.

June Knox-Mawer is survived by her husband, and by a son and a daughter.

June Knox-Mawer, author and broadcaster, was born on May 10, 1930. She died of cancer on April 19, 2006, aged 75.

This tribute, by Sue MacGregor, appeared in The Guardian:

June Knox-Mawer

A radio voice for Wales and Woman's Hour
Sue MacGregor
Wednesday May 3, 2006

The writer and broadcaster June Knox-Mawer, who has died aged 75, possessed the warmth, intelligence and exuberant good humour to give her a remarkably attractive radio voice, as well as make her a colleague held in great affection. In the 1970s and 80s she was a regular reporter and feature-maker on Woman's Hour, occasionally taking over as the Radio 4 programme's main presenter.

She was born June Ellis in Wrexham, north Wales. As a young woman she was considered exceptionally good-looking, with the pale skin and dark hair that marked her as Welsh. Indeed, throughout her life she felt passionately attached to Wales, though her marriage to her compatriot, the lawyer Ronnie Knox-Mawer took her to exotic postings abroad. After attending local schools, she trained as a journalist on the Chester Chronicle, where she worked as a reporter until her marriage. From then on she generally managed to avoid the tyranny of typewriters, preferring to write articles, radio talks and even books in longhand.

Her first book, The Sultans Came to Tea (1961), recorded her life as the wife of the chief magistrate in Aden, where her friendliness and curiosity about the lives of others led to warm relationships with Arab families. From Aden, they moved to the South Pacific, where Ronnie progressed from senior magistrate to acting chief justice of Fiji and joint chief justice for Nauru and Tonga - an enormous bailiwick. June wrote about this world in A Gift of Islands (1965) and in her first novel, Marama (1982), which was based on the memoirs of European missionaries and other travellers in the mid-19th century.

Back in Britain at the beginning of the 1970s, Ronnie continued his legal work, eventually becoming a deputy circuit judge in London. This gave June her chance to flourish as a broadcaster, a skill first nurtured in Fiji by Chris Venning, himself later a senior BBC radio drama producer. Looking for a British voice to help with his English By Radio broadcasts for Hindi and Fijian speaking listeners, he picked June; later he made her an announcer and interviewer.

Back in Britain, her skills were honed by local radio in Liverpool and then by the BBC in Manchester, after producer Gillian Hush asked her to present Woman's Hour and Weekend Woman's Hour from their studios. June was a "natural" - a presenter who could write and deliver to perfection the sort of script that magazine programmes required, making a seamless whole out of a bundle of disparate items. She was also a meticulous researcher and an intuitive interviewer: her interested and friendly method of inquiry brought dividends. Her regular appearances on Woman's Hour in London included, in the 1980s, a partnership with Edward Blishen reviewing paperback books. Later she hosted Concerto, a series of illustrated interviews with musicians.

But it was documentary and feature-making that June most enjoyed. As a reporter, she tended to gravitate towards her Welsh childhood haunts - she and Ronnie seemed to know almost everyone in North Wales. In 1977, she made a memorably atmospheric programme about Erddig, Wrexham, a rather forbidding pile (now a National Trust property), owned by a series of reclusive squires called Yorke. She had remembered walks and picnics there as a girl, and her enthusiastic guide on the programme was the last squire, Peter Yorke. She was also drawn to Clyro, near Hay, where she took a microphone along the hills and valleys of Radnorshire and Breconshire in the footsteps of Francis Kilvert, the Victorian parson and diarist.

All the while June continued with her writing. Her novel Sandstorm won the romantic novel of the year award in 1992; nine years later, she brought out a gentle and amusing memoir, A Ram in the Well, about buying and living in a cottage perched perilously halfway up a mountain in Denbighshire. It was a good way to renew her roots, and she and Ronnie happily divided their time between this restored property, Fron Fawr, and their flat at the top of a narrow house in Mayfair.

Ronnie survives her, as do their son and daughter.

· June Knox-Mawer, writer and broadcaster, born May 10 1930; died April 19 2006