Kay Dick was a celebrated novelist, writer and editor. Her life began as unconventionally as she was to live it. She was born in London in 1915 to a penniless part-Irish actress and 'baptised' in the Café Royal by her bohemian friends. Educated in London and Geneva, she worked at Foyles bookshop and became the first female director of an English publishing house, P.S. King & Son, aged just 26 (George Orwell inscribed her copy of Animal Farm : 'Kay - To make it and me acceptable' in recognition of her editorial work). She later wrote for the New Statesman and reviewed for the Times , Spectator and Punch , as well as editing literary magazine The Windmill under the pseudonym Edward Lane. Dick wrote seven novels including T hey (1977) which won the South-East Arts Literature Prize ; researched biographies of Colette, Carlyle, and the character of Pierrot; edited anthologies of stories and interviews; and tirelessly campaigned for Public Lending Right alongside Brigid Brophy.

For 22 years she lived with her long-term partner, novelist Kathleen Farrell, in Hampstead, before moving to Brighton, where she championed young writers in a book-lined flat with 'cigarettes, cream teas and martinis'. Dick died in 2001. Carmen Maria Machado is the celebrated author of a bestselling memoir, In the Dream House , as well as the award-winning short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties . She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of - among others - the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Shirley Jackson Award and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in places including the New Yorker , New York Times and Vogue , and she has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Yaddo. She lives in Philadelphia and is Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.