Philippa Pearce - Writing Career

Writing Career

In 1951 Pearce spent a long while in hospital, recovering from tuberculosis. She passed the time 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 Ardizzone. It was a commended runner up for the annual Carnegie Medal. Like several of her subsequent books, it was clearly inspired by the area where she had been raised: the villages of Great and Little Shelford became Great and Little Barley; Cambridge became Castleford (nothing to do with the real town of the same name in West Yorkshire) and lost its university; the River Cam became the River Say. Minnow was published in the U.S. as The Minnow Leads to Treasure (1958), adapted in Canada as a 1960 TV series with the original title, and adapted for British television in 1972 as Treasure over the Water.

Her second book was Tom's Midnight Garden, published by Oxford in 1958. Its "midnight garden" was based directly on the garden of the Mill House where Pearce was raised. Tom has become one of the classic "time stories" (specifically time slip), inspiring a film, a stage play, and three TV versions. It won the annual Carnegie Medal and for the 70th anniversary celebration in 2007, a panel named it one of the top ten Medal-winning works, which composed the ballot for a public election of the nation's favourite. Tom's Midnight Garden finished second in the vote from that shortlist, between two books that were about 40 years younger.

She wrote over 30 books, including A Dog So Small (1962), The Squirrel Wife (1971), The Battle of Bubble and Squeak (1978), and The Way To Sattin Shore (1983). The Shadow Cage and other tales of the supernatural (1977), Bubble and Squeak, and Sattin Shore were the later three of her four Carnegie Medal runners up. The Battle of Bubble and Squeak inspired a two-part television adaptation in Channel 4's Talk, Write and Read series of educational programming.

Although not a prolific author of full-length books, Philippa Pearce continued to work over the following years, speaking at conferences, editing anthologies and writing short stories. She attended a 2002 reception for children's authors at Number 10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister.

In 2004 she published her first new full-length book for two decades, The Little Gentleman. One more children's novel was published posthumously in 2008, A Finder's Magic.