OXENBURY, Helen

1938 - ?

Helen Gillian Oxenbury was born at Ipswich on 2 June 1938, daughter of Thomas Bernard Oxenbury and his wife Muriel Helen née Taylor (1 April 1915-27 July 2004) who married at Smethwick in 1934. Helen was educated Ipswich High School for Girls and studied at Ipswich School of Art under Philip Fortin, and as a teenager, began working in local theatres and selected the college where she could study set design, which was the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London where she met her future husband, author, and illustrator John Mackintosh Burningham (27 April 1936–4 January 2019). Helen later followed him to Israel and for three years was painter and designer for the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 1962 she returned to Britain where she worked as a scenery designer and they married in Samford, Suffolk on 15 August 1964, and had three children, Lucy, William Benedict and Emily Josephine. Helen is an award-winning writer and illustrator of at least fifty children's books some in several editions including 'Numbers of Things' (1967), 'ABC of Things' (1972), 'Pig Tale' (1973) and the 'Tom and Hippo' series and has illustrated at least twenty-five others, her first projects were illustrations for books by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. She has won the annual Kate Greenaway Medal twice, the British librarians' award for illustration and been runner up four times and her 1999 illustrated edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was named one of the top ten winning works in 2005. In 2020 she was living at Hampstead, London.

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Works by This Artist