Gillian Elise Avery (30 September 1926 – 31 January 2016) 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 . It was adapted for television in 1990. 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). Avery was born in Reigate, Surrey, and attended Dunottar School there. She worked first as a journalist on the Surrey Mirror, then for Chambers' Encyclopaedia and Oxford University Press. In 1952 she married the literary scholar A. O. J. Cockshut, with whom she moved to Manchester, returning to Oxford in 1966. They had a daughter. Avery died in January 2016 at the age of 89.