Shirley Hughes | |
|---|---|
 Hughes in 2011 | |
| Born | Winifred Shirley Hughes (1927-07-16)16 July 1927 West Kirby, England |
| Died | 25 February 2022(2022-02-25) (aged 94) London, England |
| Occupation | Illustrator, writer |
| Period | 1960–2022 |
| Genre | Children's literature, picture books |
| Notable works |
|
| Notable awards | Kate Greenaway Medal 1977, 2003 |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3 |
Winifred Shirley HughesCBE (16 July 1927 – 25 February 2022) was an English author and illustrator. She wrote more than fifty books, which have sold more than 11.5 million copies, and illustrated more than two hundred.[1][2][3][4]
Hughes won the 1977 and 2003 Kate Greenaway Medals for British children's book illustration.[4][5][6] In 2007, her 1977 winner,Dogger, was named the public's favourite winning work of the award's first fifty years.[7][8] She won the inauguralBookTrust lifetime achievement award in 2015.[9] She was a recipient of theEleanor Farjeon Award. She was a patron of theAssociation of Illustrators.[10]
Hughes was born inWest Kirby,[11] then in the county ofCheshire (now inMerseyside), on 16 July 1927.[12][13] The daughter of Thomas James Hughes, owner of the Liverpool-based store chainT. J. Hughes and his wife Kathleen (née Dowling), she grew up in West Kirby on theWirral.[14] She recalled being inspired from childhood by artists likeArthur Rackham andW. Heath Robinson,[15] and later by thecinema and theWalker Art Gallery.[16][17] Particular favourites of hers were Edward Ardizzone, and EH Shepard who illustratedWind in the Willows andWinnie-the-Pooh.[18]
She enjoyed frequent visits to the theatre with her mother, which gave her a love for observing people and a desire to create.[18]
She was educated atWest Kirby Grammar School, but Hughes said she was not a particularly good student academically, and when she was 17, she left school to studydrawing andcostume design at theLiverpool School of Art.[9][18] In Liverpool she found that societal pressure was put on her to find a husband and then not achieve much with her life. She longed to escape from these claustrophobic expectations, so moved toOxford in order to attend theRuskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.[2][18]
After art school she moved toNotting Hill, London.[19] In 1952, she married John Sebastian Papendiek Vulliamy, anarchitect andetcher.[20] They had three children together: the journalistEd Vulliamy, the geneticist Tom Vulliamy, and Clara Vulliamy, who is also a children's book illustrator.[21]
No one sinceRembrandt has so perfectly captured the precarious half-balance of the toddler's toddle. And I don't think anyone ever has depicted ordinary domestic mess so honestly...The parents were also always present in the story – something unusual in children's books. Even more unusual, the siblings in her stories are often really good – even gallant – to each other. The neighbourhood is warm and friendly and multicultural. Her world is our world at its best. The mess and the frizz have their place within a bigger conviction that stories about ordinary children doing ordinary things – getting locked out, losing a toy – could be just as full of courage, wonder and grace as any epic of fairyland.
In Oxford, Hughes was encouraged to work in thepicture book format and makelithographic illustrations.[14] However, after graduating she attempted to pursue her ambitions of becoming a theatre designer, and took a job at the Birmingham Rep Theatre. She quickly decided that the "enclosed hothouse" of the theatre world wasn't for her, so followed her former tutor's advice and started working as an illustrator.[18] She began by illustrating the books of other authors, includingMy Naughty Little Sister byDorothy Edwards andThe Bell Family byNoel Streatfeild.[14][19] The first published book she both wrote and illustrated wasLucy & Tom's Day, which was made into a series of stories.[1] She went on to write over fifty more stories, includingDogger (1977), theAlfie series (1977), featuring a young boy named Alfie and sometimes his sister Annie-Rose, and theOlly and Me series (1993).[21] TheWalker Art Gallery in her hometown of Liverpool hosted an exhibition of her work in 2003, which then moved to theAshmolean Museum in Oxford.[23][24]
Her most famous book,Dogger, is about a toy dog who is lost by a small boy, but is then reunited with his owner after being found in a jumble sale. This book was inspired by her son, Ed, who lost his favourite teddy in Holland Park. A real Dogger also existed, and was on display along with the rest of her work at her exhibition in London and Oxford.[18]
Hughes illustrated 200 children's books throughout her career, which sold more than 10 million copies.[11] InWorldCat participating libraries, eight of her ten most widely held works wereAlfie books (1981 to 2002). The others wereDogger (rank second) andOut and About (1988).[25] Hughes wrote her first novel in 2015, a young-adult book titledHero on a Bicycle.[9] She was 84 years of age when she wrote this.[18]
Hughes died on 25 February 2022 at her home in London. She was 94, and suffered from a brief illness prior to her death.[11][14] She was paid tribute to by the UK's largest children's reading charity, theBookTrust, who said they were "devastated" by her death and that her "incredible stories and illustrations, from Dogger to Alfie and Lucy and Tom, have touched so many generations and are still so loved. Thank you, Shirley.”[26]Michael Morpurgo, author ofWar Horse, praised her, noting that she "began the reading lives of so many millions."[11]
Dogger (1977), which she wrote and illustrated, was the first story by Hughes to be widely published abroad[17] and it was recognised by theLibrary Association'sKate Greenaway Medal as the year's best children's book illustration by aBritish subject.[4] In celebration of the 70th anniversary of the companionCarnegie Medal in 2007, it named one of the top ten Greenaway Medal-winning works by an expert panel and then named the public favourite, or"Greenaway of Greenaways". (The public voted on the panel's shortlist of ten, selected from the 53 winning works 1955 to 2005. Hughes andDogger polled 26% of the vote to 25% for its successor as medalist,Janet Ahlberg andEach Peach Pear Plum.)[7][8][27][28]
Hughes won a second Greenaway (no illustrator has won three) forElla's Big Chance (2003), her own adaptation ofCinderella, set in the 1920s.[5][6] It was published in the U.S. asElla's Big Chance: A Jazz-Age Cinderella (Simon & Schuster, 2004). She was also a three-time Greenaway commended runner up: forFlutes and Cymbals: Poetry for the Young (1968), a collection compiled byLeonard Clark; forHelpers (Bodley Head, 1975), which she wrote and illustrated; and forThe Lion and the Unicorn (Bodley Head, 1998), which she wrote and illustrated (Highly Commended).[29][a]
In 1984, Hughes won theEleanor Farjeon Award for distinguished service to children's literature, in 1999 she was awarded anOBE, and in 2000 she was made a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Literature. She was also granted an Honorary Fellowship byLiverpool John Moores University[19] and Honorary Degrees by theUniversity of Liverpool in 2004[30] and theUniversity of Chester in 2012.[31]
Booktrust, the UK's largest reading charity, awarded Hughes their first lifetime achievement award in 2015.[9]
AlreadyOfficer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), Hughes was appointedCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the2017 New Year Honours for services to literature.[32]
