Eve Garnett

Eve Garnett was a British author and illustrator, born circa January 9, 1900. She was educated at two schools in Devon and at the Alice Ottley School in Worcester. She then went to the Chelsea Polytechnic School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, and eventually exhibited at the Tate Gallery, the LeFevre Gallery and the New English Art Club.

She was commissioned to illustrate Evelyn Sharp's 1927 book "The London Child", and became "appalled by conditions prevailing in the poorer quarters of the world's richest city". She became determined to show up some of the evils of poverty and extreme class division in the United Kingdom, and especially the London of the time; to this end, she worked on a 40-foot mural at the Children's House in Bow, a book of drawings with commentary called "Is It Well With The Child?" (1938), and she wrote and illustrated a book which, unlike most other British children's literature of the time, dealt with the social conditions of the British working class.

This book, The Family from One End Street, was initially rejected by several publishers who deemed it "not suitable for the young". Eventually, however, it was published by Frederick Muller, and won the Carnegie Medal as the best children's book of 1937, beating J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. It was first published by Puffin Books in 1942 and has come to be regarded as a classic, having remained in print from its publication to the present day.

The manuscript of the sequel, Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street, was thought to have been destroyed in a fire in 1941, but it was finally deciphered and published in 1956. A further book in the series, Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn, appeared in 1962.

She also wrote and illustrated "In and Out and Roundabout: Stories of a Little Town" (1948), "Lost and Found: Four Stories" (1974) and "First Affections" (1982), while she illustrated "Bad Baron of Crashbania" (1932), Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1947), "A Book of the Seasons: An Anthology" (1952) and "A Golden Land" (1958).

She was also an enthusiastic traveller, and spent much of her time in northern latitudes, claiming to have crossed the Arctic Circle 16 times. She was particularly interested in the Danish/Norwegian explorer and missionary Hans Egede, and made many visits to Norway to study his life. Out of this research came a radio play, "The Doll's House in the Arctic", and the 1968 book "To Greenland's Icy Mountains".

Eve Garnett, who lived for many years in Lewes, Sussex (latterly East Sussex), died in a nursing home there on April 5, 1991.