Winifred Shirley Hughes (16 July 1927 – 25 February 2022) was an English author and illustrator. She wrote more than fifty books, which have sold more than 11.5 million copies, and illustrated more than two hundred. As of 2007, she lived in London. Hughes won the 1977 and 2003 Kate Greenaway Medals for British children's book illustration. In 2007, her 1977 winner, Dogger, was named the public's favourite winning work of the award's first fifty years. She won the inaugural BookTrust lifetime achievement award in 2015. She was a recipient of the Eleanor Farjeon Award. She was a patron of the Association of Illustrators. Early life Hughes was born in West Kirby, then in the county of Cheshire (now in Merseyside), on 16 July 1927. The daughter of Thomas James Hughes, owner of the Liverpool-based store chain T. J. Hughes and his wife Kathleen (née Dowling), she grew up in West Kirby on the Wirral. She recalled being inspired from childhood by artists like Arthur Rackham and W. Heath Robinson, and later by the cinema and the Walker Art Gallery. Particular favourites of hers were Edward Ardizzone, and EH Shepard who illustrated Wind in the Willows and Winnie-the-Pooh. She enjoyed frequent visits to the theatre with her mother, which gave her a love for observing people and a desire to create. She was educated at West Kirby Grammar School, but Hughes said she was not a particularly good student academically, and when she was 17, she left school to study drawing and costume design at the Liverpool School of Art. In Liverpool she found that societal pressure was put on her to find a husband and then not achieve much with her life. She longed to escape from these claustrophobic expectations, so moved to Oxford in order to attend the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. After art school she moved to Notting Hill, London. In 1952, she married John Sebastian Papendiek Vulliamy, an architect and etcher. They had three children together: the journalist Ed Vulliamy, the geneticist Tom Vulliamy, and Clara Vulliamy, who is also a children's book illustrator. Career In Oxford, Hughes was encouraged to work in the picture book format and make lithographic illustrations. However, after graduating she attempted to pursue her ambitions of becoming a theatre designer, and took a job at the Birmingham Rep Theatre. She quickly decided that the "enclosed hothouse" of the