IN
Gillian Avery (1926- ) was born in Reigate, Surrey, where she
started her writing career as a journalist on the Surrey Mirror.
Deciding that the pace of book publishing was more congenial than
that of newspapers, she went to Oxford in 1950 to work for the
Clarendon Press. In 1952 she married a don, Anthony Cockshut, and
when they moved to Manchester she was so homesick for Oxford that
she set her first novel, The Warden's Niece (1957), in an Oxford
college in Victorian times, feeling an affinity between her own
pre-war generation and the Victorian child, characterized by a
'meek acceptance of the power of the adult world'. Returning to
Oxford in 1964, she continued to write novels, including A Likely
Lad, set in Manchester, which won the Guardian award for children's
fiction in 1971 and was successfully dramatized as a children's TV
serial.
Gillian Avery is also well known as a reviewer and historian of
children's literature. Her two most recent books are Behold the
Child: American Children and their Books, 1621-1922 and The
Everyman Anthology of Poetry for Children.
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
