After being educated in Geneva and London, Kay Dick (1915-2001) found herself mixing with a "louche set" that included Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, and Muriel Spark. At the age of twenty-six, she became the first female director of an English publishing house, and from the 1940s through the '60s, she and her long-term partner, the novelist Kathleen Farrell, were at the heart of the London literary scene. She published seven novels-including They , which is also published by McNally Editions-a study of the commedia dell'arte, and two volumes of literary interviews. Eley Williams is the author of the short story collection Attrib. -which won both the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize-and the Betty Trask Award-winning novel The Liar's Dictionary . She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Oxfordshire.