Alison Prince

From The Guardian's obituary, written by Julia Eccleshare:

Alison Prince was the author of more than 50 books for children, as well as an artist, poet and musician, and a TV scriptwriter best known for the BBC’s animation series Trumpton.

With the artist Joan Hickson, in 1966 she created the BBC Watch with Mother series Joe, about a little boy whose parents ran a motel. Joe stories were published in comics, Joe annuals and books including Joe and a Horse and Other Stories from Watch With Mother (1968), and Joe and the Nursery School and Joe Moves House (both 1972).

She wrote and presented stories for Jackanory and then wrote the scripts for Trumpton. A follow-up to the hugely successful Camberwick Green, Trumpton (1967) was about life in a small town as experienced by the local firemen.

She soon realised that her storytelling would be shaped by technical limitations: “It dawned on me how quaint the remit was. You can’t depict flames using stop-motion, nor can you do smoke and water. So I realised I would have to write 13 stories about a fire brigade that never went anywhere near a fire.”

To identify the characters, she came up with the much-loved rhyme, ""Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb." Scriptwriting for children’s TV launched Alison’s book-writing career, which was almost all for children. She had a light and humorous touch and particularly enjoyed writing animal characters, as in Bumble (2001), the story of a hamster, and Spud (2003), the big-hearted doggy hero.

For older readers she wrote historical stories, including How’s Business (1987), set in WW2, and The Lost King: Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (2014). She achieved critical success for The Sherwood Hero, a contemporary remake of the Robin Hood legend set in 1990s Glasgow, for which she was a joint winner, with Philip Pullman, of the 1996 Guardian children’s fiction prize. Later, her thriller Oranges and Murder was the Scottish Arts Council’s children’s book of the year in 2002.

Alison never stopped writing; interviewed when she was 86 she said she had no lack of ideas, just less time to write them down. Her books have been translated into languages including Danish, German, Japanese and Welsh. Her notable contribution to children’s literature was recognised in 2005 with an honorary doctorate from the University of Leicester for services to children’s literature.

For adults, Alison wrote biographies of Kenneth Grahame (2015) and Hans Christian Andersen (1998). She also wrote The Necessary Goat (1992), a collection of essays on formative thinking created during a fellowship in creative writing at Jordanhill College, Glasgow. She wrote two collections of poems, The Whifflet Train (2003) and Waking at Five Happens Again (2016), and had many single poems published in magazines. She won the Literary Review’s grand poetry prize twice.

Alison was born in Beckenham, Kent, and educated at Beckenham Girls Grammar School. She won a scholarship to the Slade, and its influence never left her. On graduating, she trained as a teacher at Goldsmiths College, London. She married in 1957 and had three children.

Alison valued working with children and loved their responses to her work. She loved writing How’s Business, which was created during weekly sessions with a group of children. The book was later made into a film (1992) and Alison remained in touch with several of the children who had taken part.

In the 80s she moved to the Scottish island of Arran, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Alison Prince, writer, born 26 March 1931; died 12 October 2019