Kay Dick

Kay Dick (1915–2001) was a novelist, writer and editor. She was the first female director of a British publishing company and, with Brigid Brophy, Maureen Duffy and others, an early campaigner for the Public Lending Right.

Her debut novel By the Lake (1949) was followed by Young Man (1951) and An Affair Of Love (1953) which was highly praised by L.P. Hartley. Two further novels, Solitaire (1958) and Sunday (1962), followed before her triumphant change of direction with They (1977). This award-winning novel, subtitled “a sequence of unease”, found a new generation of readers 50 years after its original publication when Lucy Scholes, writing in The Paris Review, described it as “a lost dystopian masterpiece”. In 2022 Faber reissued a new edition with advance praise from Margaret Atwood, Edna O’Brien, Eimear McBride, Emily St. John Mandel, Ian Rankin and others. They has subsequently been published in several languages and adapted for stage by Maxine Peake.

Kay Dick’s final and most autobiographical novel The Shelf (first published in 1984) will be reissued in 2027.

Her non-fiction includes Pierrot (1960), a major investigation into the commedia dell’arte, and two collections of interviews with writers, Ivy and Stevie (1971) and Friends and Friendship (1974). She extensively researched but never completed either her biography of Colette or a planned investigation into the marriage of Jane Welsh Carlyle and Thomas Carlyle.

There is more information about Kay Dick’s life and work on the website kaydick.com.

For all enquiries relating to Kay Dick, please contact Nora Perkins at Curtis Brown Heritage: norah.perkins@curtisbrown.co.uk

Photo of Kay Dick © Helen Craig