Philippa Pearce

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Philippa Pearce is an English children's author born in 1920 and brought up in the King's Mill House in the village of Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire. Educated at the Perse School for Girls, Cambridge, and at Girton College, Cambridge, she then moved to London and worked for many years writing and producing schools radio programmes for the BBC, before publishing her first book, Minnow on the Say, in 1955. Like several of her subsequent books, it was inspired very clearly by the area where she had grown up, with the villages of Great and Little Shelford becoming Great and Little Barley, Cambridge becoming "Castleford" (nothing to do with the real town of the same name in West Yorkshire) and losing its university, and the River Cam becoming the River Say.

Her most famous book, Tom's Midnight Garden (1958), has become one of the classic "time stories", inspiring a film and three TV versions. The "midnight garden" was, in fact, based directly on the garden of the millhouse where she had grown up. Her other books include A Dog So Small (1962), The Battle of Bubble and Squeak (1978) and The Way To Sattin Shore (1983). The Battle of Bubble and Squeak inspired a two part television adaptation in Channel 4's Talk, Write and Read, series of Educational programming.

Philippa Pearce's husband, Martin Christie, died shortly after the birth of their only child, when Philippa was already in her forties. Since 1973 the author has lived once again in Great Shelford, down the same lane where she was brought up.

Although not a prolific author of full-length books, Philippa Pearce has continued to work over the decades, speaking at conferences, editing anthologies and writing short stories, as well as attending a reception for children's authors at Number 10 Downing Street - the London home of the British Prime Minister - in 2002. In 2004 she published her first new full-length book for two decades, The Little Gentleman.