Ann Philippa Pearce OBE (22 January 1920 – 21 December 2006) was an English author of children's books. Best known of them is the time-slip novel Tom's Midnight Garden, which won the 1958 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, as the year's outstanding children's book by a British subject. Pearce was a commended runner-up for the Medal a further four times. Early life Philippa Pearce was the youngest of four children of a flour miller and corn merchant, Ernest Alexander Pearce, and his wife Gertrude Alice née Ramsden, who lived at the Mill House by the River Cam in the village of Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, where she was brought up. She started school only at the age of eight because of illness, then she went on to attend the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge and win a scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge to read English and History. After gaining her degree, Pearce moved to London, where she found work as a civil servant. Later she wrote and produced schools' radio programmes for the BBC, where she remained for 13 years. She was a children's editor at the Oxford University Press from 1958 to 1960 and at the André Deutsch publishing firm from 1960 to 1967. Writing career In 1951 Pearce spent a long period in hospital recovering from tuberculosis. She passed the time there thinking about a canoe trip she had taken many years before, which became the inspiration for her first book, a 241-page novel Minnow on the Say, published by Oxford in 1955 with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. It was a commended runner-up for the annual Carnegie Medal. Like several of her subsequent books, it was inspired by the area where she had been raised: the villages of Great and Little Shelford became Great and Little Barley. Cambridge became Castleford in the book (nothing to do with the real town of the same name in West Yorkshire) and lost its university; the River Cam became the River Say. Minnow was published in the US as The Minnow Leads to Treasure (1958). It was adapted for television in Canada as a 1960 TV series with the original title, and for British television in 1972 as Treasure over the Water. Pearce's second book was Tom's Midnight Garden, published by Oxford in 1958. Its "midnight garden" was based directly on the garden of the Mill House where Pearce was raised.