Mavis Cheek
Mavis Mary Cheek (née Wilson, 25 February 1948 – 14 June 2023) was an English novelist. She was the author of fifteen novels, several of which have been translated into other languages. Cheeks' debut novel Pause Between Acts won the 1988 She/John Menzies First Novel Prize. Life and career Cheek was born on 25 February 1948, in Wimbledon, now part of London. Her Scottish father, who was in the Royal Army Medical Corps, had a second family in another area of London. Cheek met him only once, when she was seven. When he abandoned them, her mother began working in a factory to support herself, her own mother and her daughter. Cheek felt she was unloved by her grandmother and her mother, and said that her feeling of being an outcast spurred her to become an observer in life. Cheek was educated in church schools until the age of eleven when she failed her eleven-plus examination and was placed in the B stream of her girls' secondary modern school in Raynes Park. They did not do O-levels in her stream, but they did do drama. She appeared in school plays, including the title role of Julius Caesar, which began her lifelong love of theatre. She left school at sixteen to become a receptionist with Editions Alecto, a Kensington art publishing company. They produced the first series of etchings by David Hockney, "A Rake's Progress", and other groundbreaking works by contemporary artists. She later moved to the firm's gallery in Albemarle Street, where she dealt with Hockney and other artists such as Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield and Gillian Ayres. In 1969 when she was twenty-one, Cheek married a childhood sweetheart, Chris Cheek, whom she had met at a meeting of the Young Communist League in New Malden when she was fifteen. He was a physicist. They both attended the Wimbledon Youth Parliament. They separated when Cheek was twenty-four. After twelve years with Editions Alecto, Cheek left to take a degree at Hillcroft College, a further education college for women, from which she graduated in the Arts with distinction. Shortly after this her daughter Bella was born. Bella's father is the artist Basil Beattie, with whom Cheek lived for ten years. Although Cheek had planned to take a degree course, she turned instead to fiction writing while her daughter was a child, reading her early literary efforts aloud at weekly meetings of the Richmond Community Centre Writers' Circle, which she attended for several years. She completed a first, very serious novel, which she said she is thankful was never published. Instead she found her metier in "beady-eyed humour". She moved from London to Berkshire in 2001, and then to Aldbourne in the Wiltshire countryside in 2003. Cheek was a moving force in 2010 behind the Marlborough LitFest. Her vision was to stop the celebrities taking over such festivals and celebrate authors who objectively write well. This has proved successful. Cheek also taught creative writing for the Arvon Foundation, for Tŷ Newydd, the