Lorna Hill

Lorna Hill (born Lorna Leatham, 21 February 1902 in Durham, England, died 17 August 1991 in Keswick, Cumbria), was an English author of over 40 books for children.

Lorna was the daughter of G. H. Leatham and his wife Edit (née Rutter). She went to Durham High School for Girls and then attended Le Manoir, a finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland. She obtained a BA in English Literature at Durham University in 1926, and there met her husband, the clergyman V. R. Hill. They were married in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1928, and moved to the remote parish of Matfen, Northumberland, where she played the organ in church and ran a Sunday school.

Hill's career as an author began when her daughter Vicki (Shirley Victorine), then about ten years old, found a story her mother had written as a child and asked for more about its characters. The result was a series of eight books about Marjorie & Co, illustrated by author herself, which began to appear in London in 1948. They were followed by the Patience series and several others.

When Vicki left home to be a ballet student at Sadler's Wells in London, Hill missed her and began to write her Dream of Sadler's Wells series. She eventually wrote a total of 40 children's books, as well as La Sylphide, a commissioned biography of the dancer Marie Taglioni, and two romances for adults, published in 1978. Hill was then obliged to stop writing by ill health. She is said to have been firm with publishers and to have earned more from her books than many of her contemporaries. Translations of some titles into several other languages appeared, including less usual ones such as Finnish (by Pirkko Biström, 1991), Indonesian (1994), Czech (1995) and Slovenian (by Bernarda Petelinšek, 1996).

In private life, Hill took an interest in animal rights that led to conflict with neighbouring farmers. She moved late in life to Keswick, Cumbria, where she died on 17 August 1991.

The Radstock, Somerset-based reprint company Girls Gone By Publishers currently has four of Lorna Hill's children's books in print. The UK publishing journal The Publisher remarked in 1989, "Lorna Hill writes the kind of books children would write for, and about, themselves if they could."