Books
Kerr is best known for her children's books. Although she dreamed of being a famous writer as a child, she only started writing and drawing books when her own children were learning to read. She has written self-illustrated picture titles such as the 17-strong Mog series and the highly successful The Tiger Who Came To Tea. She has written novels for children such as the autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and The Other Way Round, which semi-autobiographically tell the story of the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany from a child's perspective. Again it was her children that occasioned this writing: when her son was eight he saw The Sound of Music and remarked "now we know what it was like when Mummy was a little girl". Kerr wanted him to know what it was really like and so wrote When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.
Kerr lives in Barnes, London, the same house she has lived in since 1962. She says that since the death of her husband writing has become more important than ever and she continues to write and illustrate new children's books with Twinkles, Arthur and Puss published in 2008 and One Night in the Zoo in 2009.
She won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1974 for her young adult novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.
Kerr was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to children's literature and Holocaust education.
Read more about this topic: Judith Kerr
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I alternate between reading cook books and reading diet books.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)