10 Facts About Philippa Pearce

Ann Philippa Pearce OBE FRSL was an English author of children's books.

Ann Philippa Pearce was the youngest of four children of a flour miller and corn merchant, Ernest Alexander Pearce, and his wife Gertrude Alice nee Ramsden, who lived at the Mill House by the River Cam in the village of Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, where she was brought up.

Philippa Pearce started school only at the age of eight because of illness, then she went on to attend the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge and win a scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge to read English and History.

Philippa Pearce was a children's editor at the Oxford University Press from 1958 to 1960 and at the Andre Deutsch publishing firm from 1960 to 1967.

In 1951 Philippa Pearce spent a long period in hospital recovering from tuberculosis.

Philippa Pearce passed the time there thinking about a canoe trip she had taken many years before, which became the inspiration for her first book, a 241-page novel Minnow on the Say, published by Oxford in 1955 with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone.

Philippa Pearce wrote over thirty books, including A Dog So Small, The Squirrel Wife, The Battle of Bubble and Squeak and The Way To Sattin Shore.

Philippa Pearce attended a 2002 reception for children's authors at Number 10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister.

In 2004 Philippa Pearce published her first new full-length book for two decades, The Little Gentleman.

From 1973 until her death from complications of a stroke in 2006, Philippa Pearce lived in Great Shelford, down the lane where she was raised.