Shirley Hughes

Shirley Hughes
Born (1927-07-16) 16 July 1927
West Kirby, England
Occupation Illustrator, writer
Nationality British
Period 1960–present
Genre Children's literature, picture books
Notable works
Notable awards Kate Greenaway Medal
1977, 2003

Shirley Hughes, OBE (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.[1][2][3][4]

Hughes won the 1977 and 2003 Kate Greenaway Medals for British children's book illustration[4][5][6] and her 1977 winner, Dogger, was named in 2007 the public favourite winning work of the first fifty years.[7][8] She won the inaugural Booktrust lifetime achievement award in 2015.[9] She is a patron of the Association of Illustrators.[10]

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.[11] 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.[9] She later also attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.[2]

After art school she moved to Notting Hill, London,[12] 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.[13]

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.[12] The first published book she both wrote and illustrated was Lucy & Tom's Day, which was made into a series of stories.[1] 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.[13] 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.[14][15]

In WorldCat participating libraries, eight of her ten most widely held works are Alfie books (1981 to 2002).[16] 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.[9]

Awards

Dogger (1977), which she wrote and illustrated, was the first story by Hughes to be widely published abroad[11] 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.[4] 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.)[7][8][17][18]

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.[5][6] 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).[19][lower-alpha 1]

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[12] and Honorary Degrees by the University of Liverpool in 2004 [20] and the University of Chester in 2012.[21]

Booktrust, the UK's largest reading charity, awarded Hughes with their first lifetime achievement award in 2015.[9]

Bibliography

Alfie Stories


Other Stories

Notes

  1. ↑ Today there are usually eight books on the Greenaway shortlist. According to CCSU, some runners up through 2002 were Commended (from 1959) or Highly Commended (from 1974). There were 99 commendations of both kinds in 44 years; 31 high commendations in 29 years including Hughes and Jane Simmons in 1998.
    • No one has won three Greenaway Medals. Among the fourteen illustrators with two Medals, Hughes is one of seven with one book named to the Anniversary Top Ten (1955–2005); one of seven with at least one highly commended runner up (1974–2002); one of six with at least three commendations (1959-2002).

References

  1. 1 2 Shirley Hughes – Penguin UK Authors. Retrieved 1 January 2007.
  2. 1 2 Random House profile. Retrieved 1 January 2007.
  3. ↑ Times Online: It's all about Alfie. Retrieved 1 January 2007.
  4. 1 2 3 (Greenaway Winner 1978). Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 16 July 2012.
  5. 1 2 (Greenaway Winner 1991). Living Archive: Celebrating the Carnegie and Greenaway Winners. CILIP. Retrieved 16 July 2012.
  6. 1 2 "Shirley Hughes wins second CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal 26 years after her first". Press release 9 July 2004. CILIP. Retrieved 16 July 2012.
  7. 1 2 "70 Years Celebration: Anniversary Top Tens". The CILIP Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Children's Book Awards. CILIP. Retrieved 29 June 2012.
  8. 1 2 "70 Years Celebration: The public's favourite winners of all time!". The CILIP Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Children's Book Awards. CILIP. Retrieved 26 January 2011.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Emily Drabble, Shirley Hughes: I hope books survive, they are wonderful pieces of technology, The Guardian, 6 July 2015.
  10. ↑ "Association of Illustrators".
  11. 1 2 Shirley Hughes at Walker Books. Retrieved 1 January 2007.
  12. 1 2 3 Shirley Hughes – Alfie, Dogger and Friends. Retrieved 1 January 2007.
  13. 1 2 Booklist of Works by Childrens Book Illustrators. Retrieved 1 January 2007.
  14. ↑ "Shirley Hughes, Alfie, Dogger and Friends". Liverpool museums. Retrieved 26 January 2011.
  15. ↑ "Ashmolean Museum: Features – Exhibitions – More Details". Ashmolean.org. Retrieved 26 January 2011.
  16. ↑ "Hughes, Shirley". WorldCat. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
  17. ↑ "Pullman wins 'Carnegie of Carnegies'". Michelle Pauli. guardian.co.uk 21 June 2007. Retrieved 2012-11-24.
  18. ↑ "Carnegie of Carnegies & Greenaway of Greenaways". Christchurch City Libraries Blog. 22 June 2007. Christchurch City Libraries. Retrieved 2012-12-03.
  19. ↑ "Kate Greenaway Medal". 2007(?). Curriculum Lab. Elihu Burritt Library. Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). Retrieved 25 June 2012.
  20. ↑ "Popular children's author to receive honorary degree – University of Liverpool". Liv.ac.uk. 8 July 2004. Retrieved 26 January 2011.
  21. ↑ "Honorary degree for favourite children's author". chester.ac.uk. 17 December 2012. Retrieved 17 December 2012.

Further reading

External links

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