Kay Dick
Kay Dick (29 July 1915 – 19 October 2001) was an English journalist, writer, novelist and autobiographer, who sometimes wrote under the name Edward Lane. Life. Dick was born Kathleen Elsie Dick at Queen Charlotte's Hospital, London, England, UK, but was but raised in Switzerland by her mother, Kate Frances Dick, being educated in Geneva, as well as at the Lycée Français in London. In early life, Kay Dick worked at Foyle's bookshop in London's Charing Cross Road and, at 26, became the first woman director in English publishing at P.S. King & Son. She later became  a journalist, working at the "New Statesman". For many years, she edited the literary magazine "The Windmill", under the "nom de plume" Edward Lane. Dick wrote five novels between 1949 and 1962, including the famous "An Affair of Love" (1953) and "Solitaire" (1958). She also wrote literary biography, researching the lives of Colette and Carlyle. In 1960 she published "Pierrot", about the "commedia dell'arte". Dick was a regular reviewer for "The Times", "The Spectator" and "Punch". Dick also edited several anthologies of stories and interviews with writers, including "Ivy and Stevie" (1971) and "Friends and Friendship" (1974). She was known  for campaigning tirelessly and successfully for the introduction of the Public Lending Right, which pays royalties to authors when their books are borrowed from public libraries. In 1977, Dick published "They", a series of dream sequences that won the South-East Arts literature prize, and was described in "The Paris Review" in 2020 as "a lost dystopian masterpiece". It had remained out of print due to poor sales and Dick experiencing harsh and sexist reviews in the press at the time of the award win. "They" was re-discovered by chance in a Oxfam charity bookshop in Bath, Somerset, in  the summer of 2020 by a literary agent. It was then acquired by Faber and Faber for re-release on 3 February 2022 in the United Kingdom and MacNally Editions in the United States. In 1984 she followed the publication of "They" with an acclaimed autobiographical novel, "The Shelf", in which she examined a lesbian affair. Dick lived for some two decades with the novelist Kathleen Farrell, from 1940 to 1962.