Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a storyteller. Her first book Lucy and Tom's Day was published more than 40 years ago.

Since then in a series of beautifully drawn and enchantingly told stories,

she's become one of the most popular writers and illustrators of our time.

Her subject for the most part is the everyday life of the small child, and her pictures full

of life and movement are of crumpled lived in honest people.

Alongside Lucy and Tom, Alfie and Annie Rose and the tales of Trotter Street among many others

have sold millions of copies all over the world.

I want to give children the feeling that there's a place for them in the world,

she says, and the world is a marvelous place.

She is Shirley Hughes.

That's the point, really, it seems seems to me surely about what you write that there's a

kind of fundamental quality of reassurance about it isn't there?

Yes, they're a very young audience and they're not really ready for the wild shores of fiction, you know,

witches and wizards and things. I'm offering them a very real world that they can inhabit.

They know it's a fictional world. But you know there's a high drama in getting your boots on the right feet or

or indeed there's a crisis if you've got to start school tomorrow or

mother has a new baby or whatever it It's helping them through those moments.

But they're exploring it through the pictures, really looking at it very intently, much

more intently than adults look at pictures.

Of course, as I was saying, the characters are very lived in, they're very real.

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