Kay Dick (1915-2001) was a British novelist, writer, and editor who became the first female director of the English publishing house P. S. King & Son at the age of twenty-six. George Orwell himself inscribed her copy of Animal Farm with ‘Kay – To make it and me acceptable’ in recognition of her editorial work. Dick, who lived with her partner Kathleen Farrell, wrote five novels. In 1977 she published the mysterious They: A Sequence of Unease, a slender volume just under a hundred pages. 

Written in first person by a character never identified by name or gender, it is set in a lush but decimated English coastal village where a group of artistic refugees live in fear of something called They, a faceless oppressor roaming the countryside destroying cultural artifacts in an endless reign of terror. Who are They? Carmen Maria Machado in her foreward suggests that They represent “conservative politicians and reactionary pundits and pearl-clutching parents and cowardly institutions … censorious impulses and exasperatingly misguided discourse and soft bigotry are hardly the exclusive property of the right … If your understanding of dystopia does not begin, first, with your own complicity - the way that you are they, even if you don’t want to be - you have missed the point.” Is there any hope? Machado reminds us of the character Jane, a poet. Her punishment for writing poetry is to have her right arm held over an open fire for eight minutes by They. So what does Jane do? Learn to write with her left. 

Although They won the South-East Arts Literature Prize, it quickly vanished. Then, after being out of print for over 40 years, a copy was found in a used bookshop. Recovering They is part of a concerted effort to shine a light on LGTBQ+ writing and writers from the past who have been overlooked. They, a lost dystopian masterpiece and overlooked queer classic, is eerily prescient and startlingly urgent, and it returns to print in this special international publication brimming with contemporary resonance. It’s time to add Kay Dick and They to the literary pantheon.