Philippa Pearce
About Author
Philippa Pearce was the youngest of four children of a flour-miller. The family lived in the Mill House on the upper reaches of the River Cam. 'Although there wasn't much cash we had lots of space,' remembers Philippa, 'We had a canoe, we swam, we fished with net and with rod, we skated on flooded water meadows On Saturday afternoons, we used to creep into the the mill by a secret way and play among the bulging sacks, and hide.'
Philippa has vivid memories of her childhood. During a long spell in hospital with TB, she drew on those memories to create her first book Minnow on the Say.Although this was Philippa's first stab at writing a novel, she had been working as a radio scriptwriter and producer for the BBC's Schools Broadcasting for many years. 'We did adaptations of books. So I had to study writers' techniques and structures and understand how books were written. I began to think it wouldn't be impossible to try to do the same thing myself.'
Philippa's second and most famous book Tom's Midnight Garden was also firmly rooted in her childhood memories. 'My father had to retire and they sold the Mill House. Suddenly my childhood was chopped off from me. As they were in the process of selling, I began thinking of writing a story based on the house and the garden and this feeling of things slipping away.' The novel received huge acclaim and Philippa won the Carnegie Medal.
Philippa has now lived for many years back in Great Shelford, along the same lane from the Mill House where she grew up. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Doctor of Letters.
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