The novel inspired a film, a stage play and three TV versions. Its 'midnight garden' was based directly on the garden of the Mill House where Pearce was raised. Pearce's second book was Tom's Midnight Garden, published in 1958. It was adapted for television in Canada as a 1960 TV series with the original title, and for British television in 1972 as Treasure over the Water. It was a commended runner-up for the annual Carnegie Medal. She passed the time there thinking about a canoe trip she had taken many years before, which became the inspiration for her first book, Minnow on the Say, published in 1955 with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone.

In 1951 Pearce spent a long period in hospital recovering from tuberculosis. She was a children's editor at the Oxford University Press from 1958 to 1960 and at the André Deutsch publishing firm from 1960 to 1967. Later she wrote and produced schools' radio programmes for the BBC, where she remained for 13 years. Starting school late at the age of eight because of illness, she was educated at the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, and went on to Girton College, Cambridge on a scholarship to read English and History there.Īfter gaining her degree, Pearce moved to London, where she found work as a civil servant. The youngest of four children of a flour miller and corn merchant, Ernest Alexander Pearce, and his wife Gertrude Alice née Ramsden, Philippa Pearce was born in the village of Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, and brought up there on the River Cam at the Mill House. The Battle of Bubble and Squeak inspired a two-part television adaptation in Channel 4's Talk, Write and Read series of educational programming.

The Shadow Cage and other tales of the supernatural (1977), Minnow on the Say, Bubble and Squeak, and Sattin Shore were all Carnegie Medal runners-up. Pearce wrote over 30 books, including A Dog So Small (1962), Minnow on the Say, (1955), The Squirrel Wife (1971), The Battle of Bubble and Squeak (1978) and The Way To Sattin Shore (1983). Pearce was four further times a commended runner-up for the Medal.

Her most famous work is the time slip fantasy novel Tom's Midnight Garden, which won the 1958 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, as the year's outstanding children's book by a British subject. Philippa Pearce OBE (1920-2006) was an English author of children's books.

A Dog So Small by Philippa Pearce