Getting to know Freya Blackwood, author and illustrator

 

Freya Blackwood has been illustrating children’s book for some years now, and I have always been charmed by the characters that she creates, and by the way in which she lays out the pages. The panel above, for example , tells the story in such a creative and unique way. I have studied her work myself to learn more about picture book art direction.

   Here is an interview that Freya recently gave in which she describes her creative process. Below is a review of one of her books. 

The Bike Ride

Jan Ormerod
Illustrated by Freya Blackwood 
Board Book

For ages 3 to 5
Little Hare Books, 2017, 978-1760128982
One day Maudie decides that she needs some exercise and Bear agrees that some fresh air “would be nice.” Maudie then suggests that they go for a bike ride and Bear readily agrees.
   Before they can leave the house Maudie is going to need to find her sunglasses. Then she needs their hats, which takes time to sort out because there are lots of hats to choose from. Next, Maudie gets a scarf.
Each time Maudie goes off to get something Bear patiently waits for her. He understands how it is when a little girl needs to prepare for an outing. Bear is clearly a very good friend.
   Children and their grownups alike will be charmed by this delightful little book. With its whimsical illustrations, its charming characters, its clever story, and its funny ending, this book shows to great effect how a simple story can be a rich one.

Artwork from Freya’s book Harry and Hopper, which won
the Kate Greenaway award in 2010. 

Happy Birthday, Kate Greenaway

Art from the Pied Piper of Hamelin

For many years I saw Kate Greenaway's artwork without knowing who the artist was. Her style is very distinctive and so charming to the eye. Then I was given a copy of her nook The Language of Flowers and I looked her up. I confess that I felt rather embarrassed that I, a person working in the children's literature field, did not know about this woman, a woman who had such a big impact on the world of children's literature. As you will read below, she was a real trailblazer who refused to be dictated to with regards to her art. 

Kate Greenaway was the most popular children’s book illustrator of her generation. During the last two decades of the 19th century, her idyllic illustrations presented an aspirational view of childhood that charmed readers in her native Britain, Europe, and as far away as America. Like her peers Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, she collaborated with London’s best color-printer to produce a new, innovative product—high-quality books for the juvenile market. What set Greenaway apart in this triumvirate of excellence was her unique vision. While Crane and Caldecott illustrated stories written for children, Greenaway’s work featured the children themselves—quaintly dressed in ruffles and bonnets and set against picturesque, bucolic landscapes. 

Kate Greenaway in her studio in 1895

   Greenaway’s illustrations were appealing and relevant. Victorians celebrated childhood innocence despite the fact that child labor played an essential role in Britain’s economic prosperity. The contrast between popular sentiment and painful reality eventually inspired change, and the start of Greenaway’s career coincided with measures aimed at stopping the worst exploitation of children. The 1867 Factory and Workshop Acts were among the first directives to put meaningful limitations on child labor. Foster’s Education Act, which followed in 1870, advocated compulsory elementary education for English and Welsh children and paved the way for additional improvements throughout the decade. In this climate of social change, Greenaway’s illustrations resonated. Much to her chagrin, her fame spawned a host of imitators who copied her work on everything from handkerchiefs to caskets.
The enchanted quality of Greenaway’s illustrations reflected her own memorable childhood. She was born in London into a lively, creative family. Her father was a skilled engraver and her mother an inventive milliner. Kate was an imaginative child who absorbed the beauty of the countryside and the intrigue of city life with equal admiration. “Living in that childish wonder is a most beautiful feeling,” she once confided to a friend. “I can so well remember it. There was always something more—behind and above everything—to me; the golden spectacles were very, very big.” Through those golden lenses, Greenaway observed her father’s engaging business. John Greenaway kept a scrapbook of engraving examples, and Kate remembered how a Cruikshank illustration of an execution fascinated and horrified her. Providing an antidote were the half penny fairytales in the family library. Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast were among her favorites—mysterious, terrifying tales that nonetheless, ended well.
   Both parents encouraged Greenaway’s interest in art, and by the time she was twelve, she was winning prizes at a local academy. As her skill increased, she attended London’s South Kensington School and then Heatherley’s, the first British art school to admit women to life-drawing classes. By the age of 21 she was enrolled in London’s newly formed Slade School, an institution dedicated to equal education for women. While still attending classes, Greenaway developed her distinctive style, creating watercolors of children dressed in clothing she designed, assembled and fitted on models or lay figures. Although her costumes resembled the styles of the Regency era, a half-century earlier, they owed as much to invention as to authenticity. When Greenaway finished her education, her drawings found a modest market in the lesser-known periodicals.
   A turning point in Kate Greenaway’s career came when a Valentine she designed sold more than 25,000 copies. Her share of the profits was less than three pounds, but the card’s popularity yielded years of work designing birthday and holiday greetings. Although the enterprise provided a modest income, Greenaway’s cards were either unsigned or initialed. Her biographer, M. H. Spielmann, noted that at the age of 33 she was still “the hidden mainspring of a clock with the maker’s name upon the dial.” Greenaway’s fortunes changed in 1878 when she presented a portfolio of 50 drawings with accompanying verses to printer, Edmund Evans. Years later, Evans recalled that first meeting, “I was fascinated with the originality of the drawings and the ideas of the verse, so I at once purchased them and determined to reproduce them in a little volume.” 

 Edmund Evans engraved and printed Greenaway’s “little volume” in 1879. Although the publisher questioned the wisdom of investing in an unknown artist, Evans was in the position to take a risk. By this time, he was operating three thriving establishments built on a decade-long dominance of the juvenile market and an eye for extraordinary talent. Evans issued 20,000 copies of Under the Window, and the initial run sold out before he could release the next 50,000. This triumph began their long, profitable association. Between 1879 and 1898, Evans printed 932,100 works illustrated by Greenaway.
Despite the acclaim accompanying the release of each new Kate Greenaway book, her friends were free with advice on how she could improve her work—mistaking the simplicity of her carefully crafted world for a failure to grasp the principles of academic art. When artist Henry Stacy Marks told her to remove the dark shadows under the heels of her characters, she obeyed. When poet Frederick Locker-Lampson suggested she vary their stoic expressions, she responded politely but changed nothing. When Britain’s leading art critic, John Ruskin, advised her to strip her “girlies” entirely, she did not. “Will you—” Ruskin cajoled. “(It’s all for your own good!)… draw her for me without her hat—and, without her shoes,—(because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her—frock and its frill?”
Greenaway’s style was the result of a sophisticated, intentional effort to capture the illusive magic of childhood. She was neither naïve nor uninformed. Literature, and contemporary art provided continuing inspiration, and Greenaway was a frequent visitor to London’s museums and galleries. She regularly participated in the city’s cultural life exhibiting her work at the Dudley Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolor, and the 1889 International Exhibition in Paris. Her first solo exhibition yielded sales of more than £1,000 and some distinguished patrons—among them painter Sir Frederic Leighton who purchased two of her watercolors.
   Refined manners and a cautious reserve disguised Greenaway’s thorough understanding of the worth

Art from Kate's last book

 of her work. Long before it was common practice, she demanded the return of all her original illustrations. Although her contract with Edmund Evans for Under the Window gave her one-third of the returns from sales, she requested 50 percent of the profits from all subsequent work and refused to sell the copyright on any of her designs. Greenaway’s competitor, Walter Crane, acknowledged that her earnings exceeded his own, noting that behind her unobtrusive personality he detected “a certain shrewdness.” Indeed, throughout her career, Greenaway’s business insight yielded a handsome income for both herself and her family.   Greenaway’s last book, The April Baby’s Book of Tunes, was published in 1900. She died of cancer on November 6, 1901, at the age of 55. Her sensitive work, purposefully created to honor childhood’s innocence and charm, was her gift to posterity. Greenaway never married and had no children of her own. What little we know about her personal life is gleaned from letters saved by friends and colleagues. Greenaway was resolute about her priorities, and she valued peace and seclusion over celebrity. “You must wait till I am dead,” she once wrote in response to an interview request. “Till then I wish to live my life privately—like an English gentlewoman.”
   The Kate Greenaway Medal was established by The Library Association of the United Kingdom in 1955 for distinguished illustration in a book for children. The award is given annually in the United Kingdom by CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. You can look at a list of the winners of this prestigious award here. Titles that I have loved that won the award include The Lost Words by Jack Morris, This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen, Ella's Big Chance by Shirley Hughes, and Mrs. Cockle’s Cat by Antony Maitland. 

Aloha from Hawai’i with a book about sea turtles.

Aloha dear friends,

I am vacationing on the island of Kaua’i with my family, and I wish I could send you the sound of the ocean and the beautiful views.

   This morning I went for a walk along the coast, and on the way back I stopped at our favorite beach to see if any animals visitors were on the sands. Yesterday a young female Hawaiian Monk seal spent the day on the beach, resting. This morning a young female green turtle was there, fast asleep. If you are a relatively small air-breathing animal, staying at sea for days, weeks, or months is tiring, and every so often a snooze on a beach is very appealing. 

   The minute sea turtles hatch, they face a multitude of dangers. Below you will find a review of a book that tells the story of a young sea turtle.

Turtle, Turtle, Watch out!  

April Pulley Sayre
Illustrated by Annie Patterson 
Picture Book
For ages 5 to 7
Charlesbridge, 2010, 978-1580891493
One night, on a beach in Florida, Mother Turtle lays her eggs, carefully covering the clutch with sand before she goes back into the water. Thankfully for one of the baby turtles, there are people who protect her and her siblings. The people watch over the eggs so that they have a chance to hatch, and one moonlit night in August Turtle and her brothers and sisters dig their way out of the sand and head for the ocean.
   The world is a dangerous place when you are a tiny baby turtle. Turtle has to avoid the snapping jaws of hungry fish. She almost eats a plastic bag, which so much resembles the jellyfish that she likes to eat.
When she is grown and out in the deep ocean, she needs to avoid hungry sharks, and she almost gets caught in a net. Luckily, the net has an escape hatch built into it that was put there just so that turtles like her would not drown in the nets.
   In this beautiful picture book Annie Patterson tells a gripping story about the life of a female turtle, following her over the years from the moment she is laid in an egg, to the moment when she lays her own clutch of eggs on a beach. Patterson focuses on the many dangers the turtle faces, and shows her reads how people can help turtles by guarding their nests, cleaning the beaches, and installing Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) in their fishing nets.

   A section at the back of the book provides more information about sea turtle conservation, and the author shows children how they can help turtles even if they don’t live on or near a beach.

Happy Birthday Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“It’s an unconscious bias. It’s the expectation. You have a lowered expectation when you hear a woman speaking; I think that still goes on. That instinctively when a man speaks, he will be listened to, where people will not expect the woman to say anything of value. But all of the women in my generation have had, time and again, that experience where you say something at a meeting, and nobody makes anything of it. And maybe half an hour later, a man makes the identical point, and people react to it and say, ‘Good idea.’ That, I think, is a problem that persists.” - Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I was talking to a friend the other day and we were talking about this very thing, about the way in which women have to work so much harder to be  'heard and seen in this world.  I honestly believe that Ruth did a great deal to fight against this bias, and it is important that we all learn about her and the work that she did. 

I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark

Debbie Levy

Illustrated by Elizabeth Baddeley 

Nonfiction

For ages 5 to 7

Simon and Schuster, 2016, 978-1481465595

It is 1940 and Ruth Bader lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York. Ruth’s neighbors are mostly immigrants, and though they speak different languages, celebrate different holidays, and eat different foods, there is one important thing that they all have in common: In these families the boys get to “go out into the world, and do big things,” and the girls stay a home and get married.

   Thankfully for Ruth, her mother Celia thinks that girls should be allowed to “make their mark on the world” too, and so she takes Ruth to the library. Through books Ruth finds out about many women who have done interesting and meaningful things with their lives. Ruth discovers that contrary to what society seems to believe, girls and women can do anything. They can even take charge if they want to.

   As she grew up, Ruth saw for herself how women, people of color, and Jews like her, were discriminated against. As a child there wasn’t much Ruth could do about these injustices, but she did not forget them.

   Nor surprisingly, clever, hardworking, and hard headed Ruth went to college. There she met Martin Ginsburg, a young man who made her laugh and with whom she fell in love. The couple decided that they would both go to law school because as lawyers they could “fight unfairness and prejudice in courts.” People approved of Martin’s choice of career, but they did not think that Ruth should try to be a lawyer.

   Ruth did not listen to those who disapproved of her career choice. She went to law school and did brilliantly. Surely now Ruth would get the opportunity to bring about the changes that she had dreamed of. Unfortunately, the fact that Ruth was a woman, that she was a mother, and that she was Jewish meant that no one wanted to hire her.

   This wonderful picture book biography tells the story of one of America’s greatest woman, a woman who has fought for justice and equal rights, and who showed the world that a woman can be a lawyer, a judge, and a justice on the Supreme Court.

   At the back of the book readers will find further information about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life and her work.

 

Women's History Month - A reading of Catching the Moon: The Story of a Young Girl's Baseball Dream

 

Catching the Moon: The Story of a Young Girl’s Baseball Dream is an award winning story based on the childhood of Marcenia “Toni Stone” Lyle Alberga (1921–1995), an African American girl who grew up to become the first woman to play for an all-male professional baseball team. Despite her parents’ misgivings, young Marcenia cared only about playing baseball and was a regular on a team of local boys. Then Gabby Street, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, came to town looking for recruits for a summer baseball camp. Undeterred by the fact that the camp was only for boys, and that her family could not afford proper baseball shoes (cleats), Marcenia made up her mind to attend. She did everything in her power to change Street’s mind. Finally her determination and pluck won him over. Marcenia was accepted into the camp and on her way to making her dream of a baseball career come true.

Storyline Online has created a wonderful reading of this story for you to enjoy.

The Bookish Calendar for April - Books and information for April birthdays, holidays, and special days

Dear Bookish Friends,

Here is the Bookish Calendar for April. I'm bringing it to you today, several weeks early, so that you have plenty of time to plan for days that interest you and the children in your lives. I know that this is particularly useful for those of you who are teachers, librarians, and homeschoolers. Many of the birthdays and special days on the calendar link to review pages for books that are associated with those birthdays and special days. For example, the Titanic sank on her maiden voyage on April 15th 1912. If you click on this entry in the April Bookish Calendar you will be taken to the page where reviews about this event can be found. 

*April is National Poetry Month (USA)

Please check out the TTLG Poetry Library to discover wonderful poetry titles. 

*April is National Garden Month (USA)

I have reviewed numerous books about gardens and gardens on my In The Garden feature

*April 3rd to 9th is National Library Week (USA)

Do visit my Books and Libraries feature. 

*April 5th to 9th is National Wildlife Week (USA)

*April 2nd is International Children's Book Day 

Do visit my Books and Libraries feature. 

*April 6th is National Bookmobile Day  (USA)

*April 10th is National Encourage a Young Writer Day (USA)

*April 14th is National Gardening Day (USA)

The In The Garden feature has many wonderful books about gardening.

*April 15th is World Art Day

The Art and Artists Feature is full of inspirational books that celebrate art.

*April 16th is National Librarian Day (USA)

*April 17th is International Haiku Poetry Day

There are several books about Haiku poems in the TTLG Poetry Library 

*April 22nd is International Mother Earth Day 

The Saving the Environment Feature contains many titles that will suit Earth Day

*April 23rd is World Book Night 

*April 27 is Tell a Story Day (USA, UK, and Scotland)

*April 28th is National Great Poetry Reading Day (USA)

*April 29th is National Arbor Day (USA) 

I have reviewed many books about trees. Please visit my Books about Trees feature.

*April 29th is International Dance Day

The World of Dance feature is full of books about dance and dancers.

*April 30th is National Poem in your pocket day (USA)

Women's History Month - The Story of Marianne North

Oil painting of Mount Fujiyama framed by wisteria by Marianne North

Marianne North was an extraordinary woman of means who taught herself how to paint, funded her own expeditions to the far corners of the world to find her subjects, and wrote a biography or two recounting her adventures.

   The eldest child of Frederick North, Member of Parliament for Hastings, Marianne had shown an interest in painting and writing, proper 'accomplishments' for a young Victorian lady, suitable hobbies for the daughter of an established family, but never a thought to making a career of such things.
For the sake of both business and recreation Frederick North travelled throughout Europe and the Middle East, and Marianne would often accompany him. During these happy years she learned to improve her skills as an artist, being taught first by a Dutch artist, Miss van Fowinkel, and later by Valentine Bartholomew, one of Queen Victoria's flower painters. She met Sir William Hooker who presented her with specimens to sketch while visiting Kew and refining her skills as an artist.
With the death of her father in 1870, Marianne found herself adrift and wanting focus. Having never married she had retained much of her father's modest fortune, and now sought to use it in her pursuit - painting flowers in their natural settings.

   Her first journey alone was in 1871, she travelled via Jamaica to the United States and Canada. She carried with her suitable letters of introduction, so initially it would seem that her travels were properly accommodated, and this was indeed the case for the most part. Later, however, she found herself trudging through wilderness, scaling cliffs and enduring swarms of insects in the pursuit of her subjects. In the situation necessitated 'roughing it' in tents or sleeping on the ground, she did.
   Her second solo journey took her to the jungles of Brazil, where she stayed for 8 months and completed over 100 paintings. Then in 1875 she travelled across America on her way to Japan, Sarawak, Java, and Ceylon and then back to England briefly. With barely enough time to unpack she was on her way again, this time to India. She remained in India for 15 months and produced a remarkable 200 paintings of mostly plants, but also of the local buildings she liked. Upon her return to London she exhibited her work at Conduit Street, where the positive reception and popularity of her work

encouraged her to display her collection at Kew Gardens, in London.
   In the summer of 1879 she wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker offering to donate her collected works, along with a building suitable to house them, to the garden, with the stipulation that the gallery serve as place for garden visitors rest. Her donation was graciously accepted and Kew gained one of it most enduring features - The Marianne North Gallery. Her friend, architectural historian James Fergusson, designed the building after the colonial structures she had admired in India, and when it was completed, she carefully arranged all her paintings in a dense mosaic on the walls, sorted according to geographical location of subject. She even embellished the gallery with a few of her own designs.
   But long before it was done, she was looking for another journey to undertake. It was at his suggestion of Charles Darwin , who had been a friend of her father's, that she chose her next great destination, Australia and New Zealand. While on an expedition through Australia she met with Marian Ellis Rowan, a talented young woman who would prove to be an accomplished natural history artist in her own right, and taught her how to paint with oils.
   She developed a rapid, vaguely impressionistic, style that allowed her to complete most of her paintings in a day or less. While some critics have seen this as a weakness in her work, others have found in it a vitality, an obvious joy in creation that is almost palpable when viewing her works. Her paintings are not typical of most botanical artists in that her colors are almost more vibrant than in life, and her images, although accurate and true to the subject, do not full illustrate all the plant's distinguishing features. However, she was no stranger to plant identification and taxonomy, being something of an amateur naturalist herself. She even found and painted a previously unknown genus of tree that would later be named in her honor - Northea seychellana. For other species would be named after her, including Nepenthes northiana - one of the giant pitcher plants from Borneo, Crinum northianum - an obscure Amarylis relative she discovered in Borneo, Areca northiana - a feather palm, and Kniphofia northiae - an aloe relative from South Africa, sometimes known as Red Hot Poker.

Butterflies' Road through Gongo Forest, Brazil by Marianne North

   The one continent missing from her travels, and therefore her gallery, was Africa, so in August 1882 she packed her bags and continued her mission. She travelled down to the Cape, and then up to the Seychelles, before returning home in 1883. Her health had been failing for some time, and by the time she made her expedition to Chile in 1884, despite rheumatism and increasing deafness, it had become evident to her that this would be her last great journey. She retired to Alderley, Gloucestershire, where she died on August 30th 1890.
   Her extensive journals were edited by her sister, Catherine North Symonds, and published in two volumes in 1892 as Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North. London and New York; Macmillan, 1892) and proved so popular that a further volume was released the next year - Some Further Recollections of a Happy Life, Selected from the Journals of Marianne North, Chiefly Between the Years 1859 and 1869. (Edited by Catherine North Symonds. London and New York: Macmillan, 1893).

Women's History Month - The story of Libba Cotten

More than twenty years after the death of folk guitar legend Elizabeth Cotten, her music is still heard everywhere. Cotten, who began her public career at the age of 68, became a key figure in the folk revival of the 60's and a National Heritage Fellow. In 1985, at the age of 93, Cotten won a Grammy for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for her album Elizabeth Cotten — Live! 

Libba: The Magnificent Musical Life of Elizabeth Cotten 

Laura Veirs

Illustrated by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh 

Nonfiction Picture Book

For ages 5 to 7

Chronicle Books, 2018, 978-1452148571

Libba Cotton has music running all the way through her. Everywhere she goes she hears music. Even the sound of the freight trains clattering down the tracks near her house is musical to her ears.

   Libba’s brother has a guitar, which she is not allowed to play. However, when he goes to work Libba sneaks into his room and plays the guitar, even though she has to play it “upside down” and “backwards” because she is left-handed. This is certainly a strange way to play a guitar, but Libba does not care. Somehow this unusual way of playing works for her and she is able to create music.

   After Libba’s brother leaves home, taking his guitar with him, Libba starts to save up to buy a guitar of her own. Earning seventy-five cents a month Libba saves and saves until she has enough to buy a Stella guitar. How Libba plays that guitar! It becomes an extension of her arm and she still plays it backwards and upside down because she is left-handed and the guitar was built for a right handed player. When she is only thirteen Libba writes her first song. It is called Freight Train.

   Then life gets busy and Libba stops playing the guitar because there are too many other things that need to be done. Libba never guesses that one day, when she is a grandmother, music will come back into her life and it will change her future in the most wonderful ways.

   In this beautifully written and very moving book, Laura Veirs, who is herself an accomplished guitar player, performer, and songwriter, tells the story of an extraordinary woman who was a self-taught and very gifted musician. Libba’s song Freight Train is known by musicians and music lovers all over the world, and it was a firm favorite in Laura’s childhood home.

   In addition to the main story, Laura provides her readers with further information about Libba at the back of the book in an author’s note. She also tells us how she became get interested in Libba’s remarkable story.

Happy International Women's Day

“Here’s to strong women: May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them.” 

International Women’s Day, a global celebration of the economic, political and social achievements of women, took place for the first time on March 8, 1911. Many countries around the world celebrate the holiday with demonstrations, educational initiatives and customs such as presenting women with gifts and flowers. 
   The United Nations has sponsored International Women’s Day since 1975. When adopting its resolution on the observance of International Women’s Day, the United Nations General Assembly cited the following reasons: “To recognize the fact that securing peace and social progress and the full enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms require the active participation, equality and development of women; and to acknowledge the contribution of women to the strengthening of international peace and security.”

   The National Women’s History Alliance designates a yearly theme for Women's History Month. The 2022 theme is "Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope." This theme is "both a tribute to the ceaseless work of caregivers and frontline workers during this ongoing pandemic and also a recognition of the thousands of ways that women of all cultures have provided both healing and hope throughout history."

 

You can find wonderful books that celebrate girls and women on the TTLG Strong Girls, Strong Women feature. 

Shirley Hughes, beloved children's book author and illustrator, has left the stage

Shirley Hughes at work

 

   When I was a little girl I had a set of chapter books that I adored. My aunt and father read them to me, and then I read them on my own. The first book was called My Naughty Little Sister and it was written by Dorothy Edwards and illustrated by Shirley Hughes. The main character, the little sister, is a little 

minx of the first order. She gets into scrape after scrape and is always in trouble. I adored her. When I heard the book mentioned I always saw the little girl as illustrated by Shirley Hughes. The little girl with the red hair who had a naughty gleam in her eye. Above you see her with her best friend, Bad Harry. When those two got together you knew you were in trouble.

   I then went on to read Dogger, a story about a little boy who loses his beloved stuffed animal, and the Alfie stories. Later, as an adult, I discovered many other books that Shirley Hughes both authored and illustrated. Every single one of her illustrated stories offer up a feeling of warmth and gentleness that is unique. 

   When I heard that she had died I had a little cry, and I thanked her for all the stories that she had given me and so many other people. I then got out two of her books that I had handy and began reading. Below is an article about this remarkable woman who hugely influenced my love of the written word. 

Pages from Dogger, one of Hughes' most beloved stories

Shirley Hughes, a British children’s author and illustrator who captivated generations of young readers with warm, tender books about everyday dramas and heartbreaks — digging for worms, stamping in puddles, discovering that a favorite toy has gone missing — died Feb. 25 at her home in London. She was 94.

   While other beloved children’s authors wrote about talking animals, magical spells or dreamlike adventures in distant lands, Ms. Hughes focused on all the real things children experienced, including pint-size dramas that adults sometimes seemed to miss. “They are learning more at this stage than at any other, grappling with these big things: Are my boots on the right feet? Can I safely put my security blanket down? You have to tap into the way they feel about these things,” she told the Times of London.

   Honored by Queen Elizabeth II as well as the British reading charity BookTrust, which gave her its inaugural lifetime achievement award in 2015, Ms. Hughes wrote more than 50 books that collectively sold over 11 million copies. She started out illustrating other people’s books before writing and drawing her own stories in the 1960s, while raising three children in the Notting Hill section of West London.

   Traveling across the city with a sketch pad, she recorded scenes that provided inspiration for her work. “I lurk about in parks and play areas with a sketchbook and observe what I see: the way small children move when they are playing, how they stand when they are rather unsure of themselves, or crouch down to examine something minutely, then take off like a flock of birds,” she told the Guardian in 2017. “Then I go home and make it all up.”

   While her themes were universal, her settings — Victorian terrace houses, birthday teas — were inescapably English. “Oh Shirley,” she recalled publishers telling her, “you are so middle class, so English, you will never sell abroad.”

Alfie gets locked in

   Yet Ms. Hughes acquired a wide readership with “Dogger” (1977), which she called “the most quintessentially English book you could imagine.” Set during a school sports day, the picture book told the story of a boy who loses his beloved toy dog: “One of his ears pointed upwards and the other flopped over. His fur was worn in places because he was quite old. He belonged to Dave.”

   Translated into more than a dozen languages, “Dogger” won the Kate Greenaway Medal, a top British honor for illustrated children’s books, and was voted the public’s favorite Greenaway winner of all time in 2007, for the 50th anniversary of the award. “Hughes has a kindly, inexhaustible eye — she misses nothing,” the Observer literary critic Kate Kellaway wrote in 2010, including “Dogger” on a list of the 10 best illustrated children’s books.

Alfie and his little sister

    Ms. Hughes had another hit with her Alfie series, which began with       “Alfie Gets in First” (1981), about a boy who accidentally locks himself   inside his house. Realizing that he can’t reach the latch to get out, Alfie    bursts into tears. With his mother and baby sister locked outside, the       rest of the neighborhood tries to help, including a milkman who offers to pick the lock and a window cleaner who brings his ladder to climb up to a bedroom window.

“ ‘Dogger’ and ‘Alfie’ are about the tiniest of incidents — down to the stress of putting your shoes on — but these things can be a source of real anxiety for a child,” children’s author Philip Pullman said in a 2009 interview with the Guardian. “And I think this is where she is actually better than [E.H.] Shepard,” who illustrated “The Wind in the Willows” and “Winnie-the-Pooh,” and who served as an inspiration for Ms. Hughes.

   While some of Shepard’s drawings could be “diabetes-inducingly sentimental,” Pullman continued, “you just don’t get that in Shirley. She is much clearer and sharper, and therefore provides a genuinely warmer version of childhood.”

   Ms. Hughes’s own upbringing was framed by World War II, a period that she described as one of
occasional fear but mainly intense boredom, in which she and her older sisters passed the time by drawing pictures and acting out plays, sometimes for their cats. She wrote about the war in several books for older children, including “The Lion and the Unicorn” (1998), about a boy who is evacuated to the English countryside during the Blitz, and “Hero on a Bicycle” (2012), her first novel, about a 13-year-old Italian boy during the Nazi occupation of Florence.

   But picture books remained her focus, even as she broadened her audience with books such as “Bye Bye Birdie” (2009), a wordless, expressionistic fable geared toward adult readers, about a dapper young man whose love interest transforms into a predatory bird.

   “It is a sad thing for adults and children alike if, once we have learned to read, the pictures in our books are sternly removed,” she wrote in a 2004 essay for the Guardian. “They not only add to the pleasure of turning a page, they are the connection through which readers acquire the amazing human attribute of being able to get pictures in the head. And these, of course, are the best illustrations we will ever see.”

   The youngest of three daughters, Shirley Hughes was born in the seaside town of West Kirby near Liverpool on July 16, 1927. Her father served in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I and founded the Liverpool department store T.J. Hughes. He died when Ms. Hughes was 5, in what newspaper reports at the time suggested was a suicide.

   Her mother “became very shy,” Ms. Hughes recalled, and often took her to the theater, helping to cultivate an interest in set design and costumes. At age 16, Ms. Hughes left school to study at the Liverpool School of Art, later attending the University of Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, where an instructor encouraged her switch from theater to illustration.

   The two art forms were not entirely different, said Ms. Hughes, who compared the page to a stage set: “But this is a very intimate theater, which the audience can return to again and again. The characters you draw are like actors on a stage carrying the narrative along with gestures and facial expressions.”

 

 Moving to London, she launched her career as a freelance artist, illustrating Dorothy Edwards’s “My Naughty Little Sister” series as well as children’s books by Noel Streatfield. In 1960, she published her first picture book, “Lucy and Tom’s Day.” Later came books including “Out and About” (1988), a poetry collection for young readers, and “Ella’s Big Chance” (2003), a Jazz Age retelling of Cinderella — in this case a red-haired young woman named Ella Cinders — that earned Ms. Hughes her second Greenaway Medal.

   She also collaborated with her daughter, Clara Vulliamy, on the Dixie O’Day series, about the adventures of a dog who drives around the British countryside in a bright red car. After the death of her husband, architect John Vulliamy, in 2007, she said she started writing children’s novels to help fill the time.

   In addition to her daughter, survivors include two sons — Ed, an author and journalist, and Tom, a molecular biology professor — and a number of grandchildren.

   Ms. Hughes received an OBE, or officer of the Order of the British Empire, for services to children’s literature in 1999, and was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017. She was still writing in recent years, publishing a sequel to “Dogger” at age 93 in 2020, and often extolled the pleasures of reading in interviews, encouraging parents to give their children time and space to slow down and pick up a book.

   “If there’s anything wrong with childhood today,” she told the Guardian in 2015, “[it’s] that there’s too much on offer and everything moves at great speed. What I want children to do is linger, turn the page, see themselves as readers long before they can read.”