Shirley Hughes

Shirley Hughes, CBE (born 16 July 1927) is an English author and illustrator. She has written more than fifty books, which have sold more than 11.5 million copies, and has illustrated more than two hundred. As of 2007 she lives in London.
Hughes won the 1977 and 2003 Kate Greenaway Medals for British children's book illustration and her 1977 winner, Dogger, was named in 2007 the public favourite winning work of the first fifty years. She won the inaugural Booktrust lifetime achievement award in 2015. She is a patron of the Association of Illustrators.

Early life

Shirley Hughes was born in West Kirby, then in the county of Cheshire (now in Merseyside). The daughter of Liverpool store owner Thomas Hughes, she grew up in West Kirby on the Wirral. She has recalled from childhood that was inspired by artists like Arthur Rackham and W. Heath Robinson, and later by the cinema and the Walker Art Gallery. She was educated at West Kirby Grammar School, but she says that she was not a particularly good student academically, and when she was 16, she left school to study drawing and costume design at the Liverpool School of Art. She later also attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.

After art school she moved to Notting Hill, London, and married John Vulliamy, an architect and etcher. They had three children together, including the journalist Ed Vulliamy and a daughter who is another children's book illustrator, Clara Vulliamy.

Career

At Oxford Hughes was encouraged to work in the picture book format and to make lithographic illustrations. Soon she was commissioned by book publisher William Collins, Sons to illustrate another writer's book. During the 1950s and 1960s she worked primarily as an illustrator for the books of other authors, including My Naughty Little Sister by Dorothy Edwards and The Bell Family by Noel Streatfeild. The first published book she both wrote and illustrated was Lucy & Tom's Day, which was made into a series of stories. She went on to write over fifty more stories, including Dogger (1977) and the Alfie series (also from 1977), featuring a young boy named Alfie and sometimes his sister Annie-Rose, and the Olly & Me series. The Walker Art Gallery in her hometown Liverpool hosted an exhibition of her work in 2003, which then moved to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

In WorldCat participating libraries, eight of her ten most widely held works are Alfie books (1981 to 2002). The others are Dogger (rank second) and Out and about (1988).

Hughes wrote her first novel in 2015, a young-adult book titled Hero on a Bicycle.

Awards

Dogger (1977), which she wrote and illustrated, was the first story by Hughes to be widely published abroad and it was recognised by the Library Association's Kate Greenaway Medal as the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject. In celebration of the 70th anniversary of the companion Carnegie 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 and Dogger polled 26% of the vote to 25% for its successor as medalist, Janet Ahlberg and Each Peach Pear Plum.)

Hughes won a second Greenaway (no illustrator has won three) for Ella's Big Chance (2003), her own adaptation of Cinderella, set in the 1920s. It was published in the U.S. as Ella's Big Chance: A Jazz-Age Cinderella (Simon & Schuster, 2004). She was also a three-time Greenaway commended runner up: for Flutes and Cymbals: Poetry for the Young (1968), a collection compiled by Leonard Clark; for Helpers (Bodley Head, 1975), which she wrote and illustrated; and for The Lion and the Unicorn (Bodley Head, 1998), which she wrote and illustrated (Highly Commended).

In 1984 Hughes won the Eleanor Farjeon Award for distinguished service to children's literature, in 1999 she was awarded an OBE, and in 2000 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was also granted an Honorary Fellowship by Liverpool John Moores University and Honorary Degrees by the University of Liverpool in 2004 and the University of Chester in 2012.

Booktrust, the UK's largest reading charity, awarded Hughes with their first lifetime achievement award in 2015.

Already Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), Hughes was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to literature.