Gillian Avery

Writer

Gillian Avery was an award-winning 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 , which was adapted for television in 1990. Gillian 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).

Gillian was born in Reigate, Surrey. She worked first as a journalist on the Surrey Mirror, then for Chambers’s Encyclopaedia and Oxford University Press.