This week: a fearless investigative journalist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a writer on I Love Lucy

THE investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who has been killed in a car bomb attack aged 53, was known for fearless exposes of the rich and powerful on Malta.

In 2016, she used the leak of the Panama Papers – 11 million files from the database of the offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca – to expose the island's links to offshore tax havens. She alleged that the wife of prime minister Joseph Muscat, the country's energy minister and the government's chief-of-staff had offshore holdings in Panama to receive money from Azerbaijan.

Mr Muscat and his wife Michelle denied having the claims.

Caruana Galizia, who had just driven away from her home on Malta when the bomb went off, had been a regular columnist for the Malta Independent, writing twice weekly for the newspaper since 1996. She also wrote a blog called Running Commentary, which was followed by many in Malta.

She had been sued for libel over articles on the blog. Opposition leader Adrian Delia sued her over a series of stories linking him to a prostitution racket in London, and economy minister Chris Cardona claimed libel when she wrote that he visited a brothel while in Germany on government business.

For many years, Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of Malta's Labour party and government. More recently she had expanded her criticism to include the opposition Nationalist Party.

Caruana Galizia is survived by her husband and three sons.

THE poet Richard Wilbur, who has died aged 96, was a Pulitzer Prize-winner and former US poet laureate known for his immaculate verse and his translations, especially of Moliere and other French playwrights. His playful, rhyming couplets of Moliere's Tartuffe and The Misanthrope were often called the definitive editions of the classic 17th century satires.

Wilbur's expertise in French literature also led him to Broadway as a lyricist for Leonard Bernstein's production of Voltaire's Candide, which premiered in 1956.

He received numerous literary honours, including two Pulitzer Prizes, for Things of This World (1956) and for New and Collected Poems (1989).

Wilbur was born in New York but raised in rural New Jersey and was first published as a poet when he was a teenager. He continued to write while serving in the 36th infantry during the Second World War. "In a foxhole, you can write a poem, but you cannot paint a picture," he said.

After the war he studied at Harvard and published his first work of poetry, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, in 1947. He also wrote children's books. His Collected Poems was published in 2004.

THE comedy writer Bob Schiller, who has died aged 98, was best known for his scripts for I Love Lucy, the iconic sit-com of the 1950s starring Lucille Ball.

He began writing for television in 1950, and three years later formed a partnership with Bob Weiskopf, with whom he collaborated for nearly 50 years.

As well as I Love Lucy, the pair wrote for other 1950s sitcoms as The Bob Cummings Show, December Bride and The Jimmy Durante Show. They also co-created and wrote the follow-up to I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show, which ran for six years from 1962.

When asked about the success and longevity of his partnership with Weiskopf, Schiller was known to respond, "That's easy — we've never agreed on anything," to which Weiskopf would fire back, "Yes, we have!" Weiskopf died in 2001.

Raised in Los Angeles, Schiller attended UCLA, where he wrote for the school newspaper. He was drafted into the Army in 1940 and while deployed overseas, he produced comedy variety shows for the troops.

After the war, he worked in advertising and PR before moving into radio, where he wrote for Abbott and Costello.

He is survived by his wife of 49 years, Sabrina, and four children.