Mairi Hedderwick

Mairi Crawford Lindsay was born in Gourock on 2 May 1939, the daughter of Douglas Lindsay, an architect who died suddenly when she was thirteen, and Margaret Crawford; She was educated at Gourock primary school and then at the independent St Columba's School for Girls in nearby Kilmacolm, but describes her childhood in the strict Christian household as "serious, very lonely", always feeling out of place. where she noticed an advertisement for a mother's help on the island of Coll. She went to the island for the first time that year, and then came back every summer of her student vacations. The couple then spent eighteen months working respectively as a dairymaid and a cattleman on a large farm estate at Applecross in Wester Ross; three months after the birth of her first child, Mark Hedderwick, they moved to Coll, where they bought Crossapol, an isolated 19th-century farmhouse at the southern end of the island, with a big Rayburn stove and oil and gas lamps and a well, but neither electricity nor running water nor permanent road access, three miles from the next nearest house, at the end of a mile and a half of white sand beach. There the couple lived for ten years, raising their two children. The couple had planned to make a living tending lobster pots and keeping a few sheep and cattle, but Hedderwick began using her artistic skills to supplement the family income, teaching in the local school, selling pictures to tourists, and in 1969 starting a printing business called the Malin Workshop producing postcards and calendars with drawings of wildlife and maps of the islands, initially all hand-printed without electricity. A visitor she met on the beach one day turned out to be an editor at Macmillan Books; showing off the nearby house full of her watercolours, she was soon signed up as a contract illustrator for the company, winning an in-house contest to illustrate a version by Rumer Godden of The Old Woman who lived in a Vinegar Bottle (1972), and then three children's books featuring Janet Reachfar by the established Scottish author Jane Duncan. With no secondary schools on the island, the family left Coll in 1973 and moved to Fort William on the mainland to remain all together. she says she could have seen herself being a farmer's wife and "interior designer of houses in wild places", had she not been a writer. == Works ==

As well as the Katie Morag series for which she is best known, which now runs to fourteen books and various omnibus collections, other books that Mairi Hedderwick has written and illustrated include: • Peedie Peebles Summer or Winter Book (Bodley Head, 1989), for younger children, featuring a boisterous toddler, set on Orkney • Peedie Peebles Colour Book (Bodley Head, 1994); paperback as Oh No, Peedie Peebles...! (Red Fox, 1997) • Dreamy Robbie! (1993), ''Robbie's First Day at School (1993), Robbie's Trousers (1993), Robbie and Grandpa (1994), Robbie's Birthday'' (1994; all Oliver & Boyd), short 8 page self-read paperbacks for the "Reading 2000 Storytime" primary years reading programme • The Tale of Carpenter MacPheigh (Blackie, 1994), part of Blackie's Folk Tales of the World series • A Walk with Grannie (Hodder, 2003) • The Utterly Otterlys (Hodder, 2006), about a family of otters on a search for a new home For other authors, in addition to the Rumer Godden book and the three Janet Reachfar books by Jane Duncan in the 1970s already mentioned, for a number of children's books in Gaelic published by Lisa Storey's Leabhraichean Beaga press in Inverness; and for four children's books by Moira Miller: Hamish and the Wee Witch (Methuen, 1986), Hamish and the Fairy Gifts (Methuen, 1988), ''Meet Maggie O'Muddle (Methuen, 1989), and A Kist O' Whistles: Scottish Folk Tales'' (André Deutsch, 1990). In the 1990s she illustrated Christopher Rush's Venus Peter Saves the Whale (Canongate, 1992), a reworking of the story from his acclaimed 1985 novel A Twelvemonth and a Day and the 1989 film Venus Peter. The book won the Friends of the Earth 1993 Earthworm Award for the book published that year that would most help children to enjoy and care for the Earth. Other books she has illustrated include Joan Lingard's Hands Off Our School! (Hamish Hamilton, 1992), a novel about the students of a small rural one-teacher primary school trying to save it from closure; and Tom Pow's ''Calum's Big Day'' (Iynx Publishing, 2000), a knockabout exploration of Scottish identity for five-year-olds. Travel writing and stationery In addition to her work for children, Mairi Hedderwick has produced several volumes of travel writing, accompanied by drawings and watercolour sketches, reflecting in often quite personal terms her feelings and experiences on four long Scottish journeys: • An Eye on the Hebrides: An illustrated journey (Canongate 1989 / Birlinn 2009), a six-month-long odyssey through the Hebrides, visiting forty different islands from Arran to Lewis. • Sea Change: The Summer Voyage from East to West Scotland of the Anassa (Canongate 1999 / Birlinn 2009), a six-week voyage down the Caledonian Canal and out to sea, undertaken to mark her leave-taking of Coll at the end of the 1990s. • Shetland Rambles: A sketching tour (Birlinn 2011), retracing Victorian artist John Thomas Reid's sketching tour in and around Shetland. Since 2005, the Scottish publisher Birlinn have published a steadily growing series of hardback stationery illustrated by Hedderwick. As of 2011 the range includes address books, birthday books, calendars and a number of different annual diaries, each featuring a multitude of different sketches by Hedderwick of the Highlands and the Hebrides. == Recognition ==

Hedderwick was awarded an honorary degree from Stirling University in 2003, in recognition of "her outstanding contribution to writing and illustration in Scotland, especially for children". She regularly visits primary schools and local book festivals, leading storytelling sessions and explaining how her books are created, often accompanied by Katie Morag's teddy bear who travels with her in his own black bag. ==References==