Philippa Pearce was born in 1920 and spent her childhood in Great Shelford, south of Cambridge, where her father was a flour-miller. The village and the river that ran by the mill played a large part in shaping her stories, especially Minnow on the Say and Tom's Midnight Garden. For most of her adult life she lived within a few yards of her childhood home.
After she graduated from Cambridge in 1942, she worked as a children's book editor, and as a scriptwriter and producer for BBC Radio. She won a number of awards for her children's books, including the Carnegie Medal for Tom's Midnight Garden. In 1997 she was awarded an OBE for services to Children's Literature. She died in 2006, aged 86."
