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Gillian Avery

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.
Russian Fairy Tales

Books

Russian Fairy Tales

Books for Women’s History Month

In honor of Women’s History Month in March, we are sharing books by women who have shaped history and have fought for their communities. Our list includes books about women who fought for racial justice, abortion rights, disability justice, equality in the workplace, and more, with insight on their remarkable lives that inspired others to

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