Her first book - Lucy and Tom's Day - was published in 1960, and she followed it with, among others, Dogger, and the Alfie series. She also collaborated with her daughter, Clara Vulliamy, on the Dixie O'Day series; which saw Shirley with an illustrator for the first time with Shirley writing the text and Clara creating the illustrations. My boys found it inspirational--and pointed out that we did Christmas crackers earlier in the week rather than at Christmas dinner. I'm sure I get more pleasure from it every year that passes, enjoying the wonderful illustrations and the simple story of a Christmas with family and friends together.

Her books include the wordless picture book Up and Up , collection of rhymes and poems Out and About , and for the very young The Nursery Collection . To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Shirley Hughes is a great loss to children’s literature and this, of all her books, seems to me one that will last.

The illustrations are so detailed and the story is very cute with hilariously accurate depictions of children’s emotions. It's the first Christmas book I've ever read that showed the children "posting" their letters to Santa by burning them in the fireplace. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I grew up with Lucy and Tom in the late Seventies and early Eighties, so revisiting the book now feels rather like looking at my own childhood Christmases, laid out in lovely thick gouache. Hughes has a lovely endearing style to her drawing - I will certainly be reading and collecting many other titles from her.

She wrote two novels for older children, Hero on a Bicycle , about a 13-year-old Italian boy during the occupation of Florence, and Whistling in the Dark , set during the Liverpool Blitz. She won the Kate Greenaway Medal twice and was awarded the OBE for her distinguished service to children's literature. Shirley Hughes was born in West Kirby, near Liverpool, in 1927, and studied fashion and dress design at Liverpool Art School, before continuing her studies at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. This wonderfully evocative Christmas book reminds me so vividly of my own childhood Christmases, with my mother making mince pies at the big wooden kitchen table and the Salvation Army playing Christmas carols.