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Kay Dick was a novelist, writer and editor. Born in London in 1915, she worked at Foyles bookshop before becoming the first female director of an English publishing house aged 26, editing authors such as George Orwell. She later reviewed for the New Statesman, Times, Spectator and Punch, as well as editing The Windmill under a pseudonym. Dick wrote five novels including They (1977), which won the South-East Arts Literature Prize but swiftly went out of print until it was recently rediscovered. She also wrote three biographies, edited anthologies and campaigned for Public Lending Right. For twenty-two years Dick lived with her long-term partner, the novelist Kathleen Farrell, in Hampstead. She later moved to Brighton, where she continued to champion fellow writers until her death 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.