Yvette Cowles dies

Former non-fiction marketing director at HarperCollins, Yvette Cowles, has died following a battle with cancer.

Cowles studied French and Italian at the University of Exeter and subsequently taught English in the South of France. She was diagnosed and treated for cancer for the first time in 1996, but had been living with secondary breast cancer since 2011, detailing some of her experiences in a blog.

Non-fiction marketing director at HarperCollins from 1996 to 2002, Cowles subsequently held a number of head of marketing roles in publishers including Sutton Publishing, The History Press and Hay House Publications.

She founded Dance Yourself Happy, a school which taught a blend of dance and yoga workshops, in 2006, and last autumn published Belly Dancing and Beating the Odds with her old firm HarperCollins.

Cowles featured in "The Big C & Me", a three-part BBC1 documentary series on cancer, which screened on 1st June 2016.

David Swarbrick, who worked with Cowles at HarperCollins, said: "What made Yvette so different was not just her professionalism, not her rich life outside the industry, or even her qualities of humour, grace, creativity and determination, but how she put this all together again to fight cancer - by burlesque, comedy and belly dancing. You couldn't make it up. But she did."

He added: “She didn't hide; she battled. And so stylishly. Her battle became therapy - for herself and thousands of others; and evolved into a show. Her show became a tour that traveled up and down the country for several years;  her tour became a book; and her book became a TV documentary. She won tens of thousands of fans, entertained hundreds of thousands more and inspired us all. And she did it through comedy: laughing; and getting us all to laugh. It was an astonishing and wildly unpredictable achievement.

"What she did in adversity showed all of us how to have the courage to live a good life, regardless as to what is thrown at you."