Kay Dick

Kay Dick was an English journalist, writer, novelist and autobiographer, who sometimes wrote under the name 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.