The city of Athens lost one of its most illustrious and widely acclaimed residents with the death of Georgia author Terry Kay from liver cancer at age 82 on December 12, 2020.

Kay was best known to most readers and television viewers for his 1990 novel “To Dance with the White Dog” about an octogenarian tree farmer and a mysterious white dog that comes to live with him following his wife's death.

The book earned Kay the Outstanding Author of the Year award in 1991 from the Southeastern Library Association and in 1993 was turned into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie co-starring real life couple Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.

Kay’s last published book was “The Forever Wish of Middy Sweet ─ A Story of What Might Have Been” released just this past August by Mercer University Press in Macon.

His first novel, “The Year the Lights Came On” published in 1976, was inspired by electricity arriving in the rural farming community near Royston, Georgia, where Kay was reared.  Kay himself became a publicist and senior vice president of corporate affairs for Oglethorpe Power Corporation following several years as a sports writer and entertainment editor of the Atlanta Journal.

Kay was inducted into Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2006.