We are delighted and extremely excited to welcome Shirley Hughes to the blog.  Shirley was the winner of the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for Dogger.  This also won the Greenaway of Greenaways during the award’s anniversary celebrations.  To celebrate the publication of the book’s sequel Dogger’s Christmas, we were delighted to have the opportunity to interview Shirley Hughes.

As well as being a hugely talented, multi-award winning author-illustrator, Shirley is also a great friend and champion of libraries.  She was selected as a guest editor for BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour and specifically asked for one of the topics during her show to be ‘Libraries’.  2020 marks the 60^th anniversary of Shirley Hughes’ first published book, Lucy and Tom’s Day.  To escape into or just enjoy a different one of Shirley’s remarkable books, follow her on Twitter @ShirleyHughes_

Please can you tell us how you first began working in illustration?

Aged 17 I studied fashion and dress design at Liverpool Art School, my favourite part of the course was fashion drawing. After just over a year I moved on to the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. There was no design or illustration tuition at the Ruskin, a tutor called Jack Townend taught lithography. It was he who suggested I might like to try some book illustration. In my final year in Oxford I concentrated on graphic work, using pen and ink, watercolour and gouache. I made a tiny amount of cash drawing adverts of ladies’ underwear for a department store on the High Street. Meanwhile I took my first job hand colouring line illustrations in an edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As I graduated Barnet Freedman, a revered illustrator, tutor, war artist and commercial artist, told me he’d consider introducing me to some publishers in London if I was serious about trying to make my way as an illustrator. This he kindly did. My first commission for a book came with a story by Olivia Fitz Roy, The Hill War and this gradually led to more work until in 1960 my first picture book was published, Lucy and Tom’s Day (Victor Gollancz).

There’s a deceptive simplicity in the way your work ‘shows’ stories unfolding and character’s emotions and motivations progressing.  In your view, what makes for a successful way of showing a story through illustration?

The text must leave space for the illustrations in two ways; firstly, physical space so that you consider where the text will be placed as you create your illustrations, but then also more loosely. The words can convey one story, whilst the drawings show something slightly different. You want to give the reader and the child things to talk about, so the child can be spotting something the illustrations reveal but the text doesn’t, that way the child is ahead of the adult.

Dogger won the Kate Greenaway Medal and in 2007 went on to be voted as the Greenaway of Greenaways by the public, what kind of impact did this recognition have on your career?

Winning the Kate Greenaway Medal for Dogger meant so very much to me. To have my work recognised by esteemed librarians was quite something. So many distinguished illustrators, whose work I so admire, had won the medal before me. The award almost coincided with my entry into the USA, and Dogger’s ongoing success led to more of my books being published there and internationally. I will never know if the Medal had any sway over the American publisher, I am pretty sure it did. It gave me such a fillip; it was a boost to my creativity and gave me a true incentive to keep going.

To be voted the Greenaway of Greenaways was an enormous honour, and I am very grateful to all those who have shared the story at home, in schools and in libraries and who came out to vote for me and Dogger. It's hugely rewarding to have created books that receive the ultimate recognition like this. Thank you.

As well as creating your own books, you’ve collaborated with some incredible names in children’s literature, Noel Streatfeild, Dorothy Edwards, Margaret Mahy… what would you say are the differences between illustrating another’s person’s text and your own and do you have a preference?

I sometimes think of my time spent illustrating authors’ work as an apprenticeship. Often I’d be asked to create a cover and say twenty line drawings. This kind of apprenticeship is so hard to come by nowadays for emerging illustrators. When it comes to visual characterisation an illustrator is best left to their own imagination, with the less interjections from the author the better really once you get going. The sparser the text the more my imagination reins free. It is slightly uncanny when you find out later that you have drawn somebody who looks like the author, or one of their relatives…

When I look back I think my biggest break of all came from working with Dorothy Edwards. I was very familiar with her My Naughty Little Sister stories; I’d read them bedtime after bedtime to my own children. However tired I was, Dorothy’s books were always a pleasure to read.  Dorothy’s first collections of stories were originally illustrated by three different artists. In 1968 I was commissioned by Methuen to illustrate When My Naughty Little Sister Was Good, and Dorothy was so pleased with how they looked that she asked that I re-illustrate all of her stories.  When the two of us finally met there was an immediate rapport. She told me numerous tales of her own childhood. She, of course, was the Naughty Little Sister. I learned a very great deal from Dorothy, not least how to address and entertain a young audience.

I had almost no contact with Margaret Mahy. I was in London and she was in New Zealand. But vivid pictures flow from her descriptions and every sentence she wrote.

I was fortunate to be asked to work with Noel Streatfeild, then at the height of her powers. She had spotted one of my illustrations, and asked her publisher Collins, if I might work on her new book The Bell Family.

It was such fun to work with my daughter, the author illustrator Clara Vulliamy, for our Dixie O’Day series. We dreamt up the stories about two chums Dixie and Percy and their adventures behind the wheel. For the first time in my life I handed over the reins for the illustrations and Clara did the drawings, with me writing the stories. With Dixie O'Day I was especially thinking about the emergent reader who enjoyed picture books but was moving into the challenge of longer text, and needs a lot of inspiration from illustrations to carry them along.

The return to Dave, Dogger and family feels so natural and seamless.  The book is an absolute classic, how did it feel to be returning to these characters and were there any challenges given how well loved Dogger is?

I’d been wanting to do another Christmas story, but it took a while for the right idea to form in my head. I thought and thought, and mulled and mulled, and then Dogger’s Christmas took flight. The simplicity of a picture book is misleading: they can take a long time to come together. The real Dogger is so vivid in my imagination I could draw him in my sleep now. It has been like meeting up again with a very old friend.

You’ve worked across so many different age-groups (from nursery upwards) and across a huge variety of forms – picture books, short stories, poetry, graphic novels.  Do you have a preferred age-group or form and do you consciously seek to challenge yourself?

My favourite audience has to be the child on the cusp of or just embarked upon school, who’s just beginning to get excited about books.

Through my career I feel I have taken on several challenges. I took on a new one in Enchantment in the Garden. I wanted to create a longer story, which might appeal to boys as well as girls, but wanted to combine text, line drawing and colour art work. I used a panel to the side of the page for the text which then left me plenty of space to explore with my colour illustrations. I used this format again with The Lion and the Unicorn, and Ella’s Big Chance. I suppose with these books I was recalling those illustrators like Heath Robinson and Arthur Rackham, whose gift books I had so enjoyed in my own childhood. I turned to longer fiction, firstly with Hero on a Bicycle and then Whistling in the Dark, following my husband’s death. I wrote at the weekends and filled my time with those longer stories whilst I worked on my colour books in the week.

On the subject of challenge, you won a second Kate Greenaway medal with Ella’s Big Chance a jazz inspired reimagining of Cinderella, how much research was involved with creating such an immersive period piece?

I wanted to set the book, with all of its dancing scenes, ballrooms and splendour, in the 1920s when dancing was coming into vogue, with dancers shimmying about, with the quick step, the two step, the Charleston. I learned so much about how fabric drapes, how it covers and moves with the figure from my time at Liverpool Art School. We studied the history of costume there too, so useful when it came to illustrating my fairy tale retelling Ella’s Big Chance. The dresses are all my designs, inspired by the great French couturiers of the 1920s such as Doucet, Poiret and Patou; and the ballroom scenes inspired by the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies.

Please can you talk us through your approach to creating a book?

I draw out my books first in rough, taking the story from double-page spread to spread. One of the toughest challenges is then to translate the vitality of the rough, which is done at great speed with a B pencil, into the finished artwork, which, of course is done at a much slower and more meticulous pace. There is nothing more exciting than starting work; sharpening pencils and squeezing out my paints on to the palette. I use gouache colour, which is water-based but has a lot more body than watercolour, so you can cover up mistakes. I begin with Vandyke Brown, getting the details in place and the figures established – paying particular attention to gestures and expressions, which carry so much of the story – before adding local colour. I sometimes use oil pastels too, especially for landscapes and skies where I can be more free and impressionistic.

Which books and artists do you admire and how have these influenced your work?

I feel I have learned from so many greats to have gone before me. If I had to choose just one, it would be Edward Ardizzone. An author, illustrator and distinguished war artist, remarkably he was almost entirely self-taught. His figures, so touching in back view, are instantly recognisable. He had a perfect sense of tone, and with a few scratched lines could tell you exactly what he wanted you to see.

Thinking of contemporary artists, I greatly admire Posy Simmonds for her humour and her line work, Raymond Briggs who is a simply wonderful artist, Anthony Browne and Chris Riddell for his political cartoons.

Family is hugely important in your books, what do your own think of your work and do they have any particular favourites among your books?

My own family are my most loyal readers – it’s very important to me to have their good opinion of my books. Ed is drawn to my longer stories, such as Enchantment in the Garden and The Lion and the Unicorn. Tom has a soft spot for The Nursery Collection, published by Walker Books (Bathwater’s Hot, Colours, Noisy among others), as they remind him of when his own children were small. Clara, because she is an author illustrator too, always says that her favourite is the one on my drawing board at any given time – I show her my works in progress and we bounce ideas around, which is a huge pleasure.

Shirley Hughes, November 2020.


A huge thank you to Shirley Hughes for her generosity in sharing so much of her time and expertise with this interview and to Clare Hall-Craggs for the opportunity.