Mavis Cheek

Mavis Cheek is an English novelist.

Born in 1948 in Wimbledon, now part of London, Mavis only met her father once, at the age of seven. Her mother worked in a factory to keep the family together and life was lived in a fairly hand-to-mouth fashion. However it was no life of misery, but a reasonably happy childhood lived in a pleasant area of London.

Mavis was educated in church schools until the age of 11 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 16 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 like Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield and Gillian Ayres. In 1969 she married a "childhood sweetheart", whom she had met at a meeting of the Young Communist League in New Malden, when she was fifteen. They both attended the Wimbledon Youth Parliament. They separated when she was in her mid-twenties. Following this and after twelve happy years working with Editions Alecto, Mavis 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 by the artist Basil Beattie was born.

Although Cheek had planned to take a degree course, she turned instead to fiction writing while her daughter was a child, reading her early efforts to weekly meetings of the Richmond Community Centre Writers' Circle, which she attended for several years. She completed a first, very serious novel, which she says she is thankful was never published. Instead she found her metier in "beady-eyed humour". She moved from London to Berkshire in 2001 and finally to Aldbourne in the Wiltshire countryside in 2003, but as she has explained in several newspaper interviews, "Life in the city was a comparative breeze. Life in the country is tough, a little bit dangerous and not for wimps."

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