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