Shirley Hughes


Shirley Hughes, 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. In 2007, her 1977 winner, Dogger, was named the public's favourite winning work of the award's first fifty years. She won the inaugural Booktrust lifetime achievement award in 2015. She was a recipient of the Eleanor Farjeon Award. She is a patron of the Association of Illustrators.

Early life

Winifred Shirley Hughes was born in West Kirby, then in the county of Cheshire. The daughter of Liverpool store owner Thomas James Hughes and his wife Kathleen, 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, the journalist Ed Vulliamy, the geneticist Tom Vulliamy, and Clara Vulliamy, who is also a children's book illustrator.

Career

At Oxford, Hughes was encouraged to work in the picture book format and make lithographic illustrations. She was soon 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, the Alfie series, featuring a young boy named Alfie and sometimes his sister Annie-Rose, and the Olly and Me series.
The Walker Art Gallery in her hometown of 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. The others are Dogger and Out and About.
Hughes wrote her first novel in 2015, a young-adult book titled Hero on a Bicycle.

Awards

Dogger, 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".
Hughes won a second Greenaway for Ella's Big Chance, her own adaptation of Cinderella, set in the 1920s. It was published in the U.S. as . She was also a three-time Greenaway commended runner up: for Flutes and Cymbals: Poetry for the Young, a collection compiled by Leonard Clark; for Helpers, which she wrote and illustrated; and for The Lion and the Unicorn, which she wrote and illustrated.
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, Hughes was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Alfie stories