Gillian Avery

Gillian Elise Avery (30 September 1926 – 31 January 2016) was a British children's novelist, and a historian of childhood education and children's literature. She won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 1972 for A Likely Lad.

In 1952, she married the literary scholar A. O. J. Cockshut, with whom she moved to Manchester, returning to Oxford in 1964.

Avery died in January 2016 at the age of 89.

Career

Avery worked first as a journalist on the Surrey Mirror, then for Chambers's Encyclopaedia and Oxford University Press.

She is the author of several studies of the history of education and of children's literature, and that scholarly interest is reflected in her own books for children, which are set in Victorian England. The first, The Warden's Niece (1957), is a witty adventure story in which Maria runs away from her stultifying boarding school to live with her great-uncle, the head of an Oxford college. Impressed by her academic ambitions (she wants to become Professor of Greek), he decides to let her stay, and she proves her abilities as a researcher by uncovering a piece of history from the English Civil War.

Characters from The Warden's Niece reappear in The Elephant War (1960), which is about an attempt by the London Zoo to prevent the sale of Jumbo to P. T. Barnum, and in The Italian Spring (1962).

Besides winning the Guardian Prize for A Likely Lad, Avery was three times a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, which recognises the year's best children's book by a British writer: for The Warden's Niece (1957), The Greatest Gresham (1962) and A Likely Lad (1971).