Content area
Full Text
ASKED what she considered her greatest achievement, acclaimed author and illustrator Shirley Hughes had the simplest of responses. 'Creating picture books that some small child might enjoy,' she said.
And she certainly did that. Shirley — who, it was announced yesterday, died 'peacefully at home after a short illness' at the age of 94 on Friday — wrote more than 50 books and illustrated hundreds in a career spanning eight decades. But it was her uncanny ability to find a simple beauty in the everyday hustle and bustle of childhood that made her a beloved feature of family bookshelves the world over.
How many children born in the past half century or so haven't at some point been enraptured by Shirley's gentle tales about a beloved stuffed toy named Dogger or an impish little boy named Alfie? How many of them haven't dusted off a battered old copy, or picked up a new edition (even in her 90s Shirley remained a prolific worker) to read with their own children?
Fellow authors Michael Rosen, Sir Philip Pullman and Sir Michael Morpurgo were among those paying tribute yesterday.
'We have all grown up with the stories and drawings of Shirley Hughes deep inside us,' said Sir Michael. 'We've enjoyed them for ourselves, with our children, with our grandchildren.
'Shirley must have [begun] the reading lives of so many millions. That moment when you've read a book like Alfie and sit back and think: "That was wonderful, tell me another." ' But some of the most heartfelt tributes came not from her peers, nor the publishing world, which twice awarded her the Kate Greenaway Medal, but from her many, many readers.
'I was raised on Hughes. My Mum could still recite the opening pages of Dogger when I was 25. Now I read her books to my baby son,' wrote one reader, on Twitter.
So prolific was Shirley (she clocked up lifetime sales surpassing more than 10 million copies of her books), her illustrations so evocative of childhood, it feels as if her best-known creations, Dogger and Alfie, have been...