Philippa Pearce

Philippa Pearce (born January 23, 1920 as Ann Philippa Pearce in Great Shelford , Cambridgeshire , England , † December 21, 2006 in Durham ) was an English children's author. She has received several awards in England for her books.

Life

Philippa Pearce was born as the youngest of four children on January 23, 1920 in Great Shelford, a small village near Cambridge , where she grew up. The experiences of her childhood, the tranquility of the village and the closeness to animals were often the subject of her books and were very inspiring. Her father was a miller and grain trader, so they also lived on the river there, which appears specifically in her first book Minnow on the Say (1955). In it, she describes experiences from her childhood, for example a canoe trip on this river. Pearce was not enrolled in Perse School in Cambridge until he was eight years old because of an illness. She then went to Girton College on a scholarship to study English literature and history . After graduating, she worked as an editor at the BBC and Oxford University Press in London . In 1963 she married Martin Christie, a former Japanese prisoner of war , a fruit farmer with whom she had a daughter. Two years later, shortly after the birth of their daughter Sally Christie, her husband died of the sequelae of his imprisonment.

Career

She graduated during the war. She worked at the Ministry of Information and then at the BBC. Shortly after the end of World War II , she wrote scripts for the radio, which taught her the structure of stories. She published her first novel in 1955. She wrote it while she was in hospital recovering from severe tuberculosis . Rejected by the first publisher, she did not give up until her novel was accepted by Oxford University Press. In the late 1950s, her father sold the house in which she was born. Her bestseller Tom's Midnight Garden is about her thoughts and memories she had of this house and the stories her father and grandfather used to tell. In 1958 she left the BBC to work as a writer for the Clarendon Press. In 1960 she switched to Andre Deutsch to write and produce for radio again. After the death of her husband, she continued her freelance career in London until she and her daughter returned to their home village of Great Shelford in 1973, albeit not to their former home. In the years that followed, she continued to write books, but focused on short stories. In 1978 she won the Whitbread Book Award for her book The Battle of Bubble and Squeak . Many of her books are about animals. They are especially written for her daughter who is a great animal lover. Her last book, which she published in 2004, was The Little Gentleman .

death

When she at Seven Stories , the Center for Children's Books in Newcastle upon Tyne , suffered in England, was visiting, where just an exhibition was carried out on them a stroke , which she succumbed on December 21 of 2006. She leaves behind her daughter Sally Christie, who is also a successful children's author.

Awards

• 1959 Carnegie Medal for Tom's Midnight Garden , illustrated by Susan Einzig
• Whitbread Book Award 1978 for The Battle of Bubble & Squeak
• Runner up for the Carnegie Medal 1983 for The Way to Sattin Shore

bibliography

Books:

• Minnow on the Say (1955)
• Tom's Midnight Garden (1958)
• Still Jim and Silent Jim (1959)
• From Inside Scotland Yard (1965)
• The Children of the House (1968)
• The Squirrel Wife (1971)
• The Battle of Bubble and Squeak (1978)
• The Way to Sattin Shore (1983)
• Bubble and Squeak (1988)
• Freddy (1988)
• Old Belle's Summer Holiday (1989)
• In the Middle of the Night (1991)
• At the River-gates (1996)
• The Pedlar of Swaffham (2001)
• The Ghost in Annie's Room (2001)
• The Little Gentleman (2004)

Story collections:

• The Elm Street Lot (1969)
• What the Neighbors Did: And Other Stories (1972)
• Lion at School: And Other Stories (1973)
• The Shadow-Cage: And Other Tales of the Supernatural (1977)
• Who's Afraid ?: And Other Strange Stories (1986)
• The Rope and Other Stories (2000)
• Familiar and Haunting: Collected Stories (2002)

Picture books:

• Mrs. Cockle's cat (1961)
• A Dog So Small (1962)
• Emily's Own Elephant (1987)
• The Tooth Ball (1989)
• Here comes death! (1993)
• Beauty and the Beast (1996)
• Little White Hen (1996)
• Amy's Three Best Things (2003)

Collections of stories with the participation of Philippa Pearce:

• Horror Stories (1988)
• Great Ghost Stories (1998)

Short stories:

• The Dog Got Them (1977)
• Samantha and the Ghost (1981)

Web links

• Literature by and about Philippa Pearce in the catalog of the German National Library
• Article with photo