Mairi Hedderwick (born 2 May 1939) is a Scottish illustrator and author, known for the Katie Morag series of children's picture books set on the Isle of Struay, a fictional counterpart of the inner Hebridean island of Coll where Hedderwick has lived at various times for much of her life.
She has also written several books of travel writing for adults, and is the illustrator of a range of Hebridean stationery.
Mairi Crawford Lindsay was born in Gourock on 2 May 1939, [1] the daughter of Douglas Lindsay, an architect who died suddenly when she was thirteen, [2] and Margaret Crawford; [1] she is the granddaughter of the Scottish missionary Dan Crawford. [2] [3]
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. [2] [4] Instead she longed for the kind of carefree existence she would later depict in the Katie Morag stories, and used to wish herself "over the hills and far away" beyond the Cowal hills that she could see behind Kirn and Dunoon on the far side of the Firth of Clyde. [2]
In 1957, she went to Edinburgh College of Art, studying mural painting and ceramics, [5] 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. [2]
After graduating she married Ronnie Hedderwick on 24 June 1962, [1] and worked for two years as a travelling art teacher in Mid Argyll, qualifying at Jordanhill College of Education. [1] [6] The couple then spent eighteen months working respectively as a dairymaid and a cattleman on a large farm estate at Applecross in Wester Ross; [7] but in 1965, [8] three months after the birth of her first child, Mark Hedderwick, [9] 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. [2] [10] 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, [9] [11] [12] initially all hand-printed without electricity. [13] [14]
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. [15] [16]
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. [10] After Jane Duncan died in 1976, Hedderwick was encouraged by her editor to take the plunge and write and illustrate her own stories. [13] [15] However it was not until 1984, three publishers later, that the first of Hedderwick's Katie Morag stories, Katie Morag Delivers the Mail, finally appeared in print inspired by her time on Coll. [15] The book was well received, and three more Katie Morag picturebooks rapidly followed in the next three years.
Hedderwick's marriage came to an end in the mid-1980s, [2] and with her children now educated, she gave up a part-time job with the Highlands and Islands Development Board advising community co-operatives and in 1990 moved back to Coll, first letting and then fully buying back the house at Crossapol, where she found her children's childhood pictures still on the walls. [9] In her next Katie Morag book, Katie Morag and the New Pier (1993), she addressed the issue of an island that was changing fast from the remote isolated place she had known in the 1960s. [15] Another four Katie Morag books followed, but increasingly Hedderwick began to find herself becoming a not-entirely-willing tourist attraction on Coll in her own right, [2] and after almost ten years she felt it was time to move on. [10]
Five years in the Scottish Borders followed, succeeded by several years restoring a pair of cottages near Jemimaville on the Black Isle looking over the Cromarty Firth; but neither felt quite right, so in 2005 she decided to return again to Coll, where she had a new house built close to her daughter and grandchildren. [2] [10] [11] [17] As of 2013 Hedderwick is living on the mainland again, in Inverness-shire; [18] 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. [19]
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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:
For other authors, in addition to the Rumer Godden book and the three Janet Reachfar books by Jane Duncan in the 1970s already mentioned, [16] Hedderwick in the 1980s contributed illustrations for a number of non-fiction books published by independent Aberdeenshire-based Northern Books; [20] for a number of children's books in Gaelic published by Lisa Storey's Leabhraichean Beaga press in Inverness; [21] 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), [22] 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. [23]
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:
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. [25]
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". [26]
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. [26] In 1999, on the other side of the fence as she put it, she organised the children's author events for the first Wigtown Book Festival. [27]
Winifred Margaret Ewing was a Scottish politician, lawyer and figure within the independence movement who served as President of the Scottish National Party from 1987 to 2005. Ewing was a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Highlands and Islands from 1999 to 2003 and a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the equivalent seat from 1979 to 1999. She was also a member of the British House of Commons for Hamilton from a 1967 by-election until 1970, and for Moray and Nairn from 1974 to 1979.
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Coll is an island located west of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. Coll is known for its sandy beaches, which rise to form large sand dunes, for its corncrakes, and for Breacachadh Castle. It is in the council area of Argyll and Bute.
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Don Coutts is a Scottish filmmaker best known as the director of the 2003 feature film American Cousins and for bringing the world of Katie Morag to the screen. The successful translation of the characters from the books of Mairi Hedderwick has won nine awards - including a US Peabody, 3 BAFTAs, a Royal Television Society Scotland Children's Award, a Scottish BAFTA and a Kidscreen award.
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Katie Morag is the title character of a series of children's picture books written and illustrated by Mairi Hedderwick. The gentle stories have been praised for their good humour, strong sense of place, and the feisty and independent character of Katie herself. The books are set on the fictional Isle of Struay, off the west coast of Scotland. Katie Morag lives close to the jetty above the island's only shop, where her mother is the postmistress and her father runs the general store.
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Katie Morag is the television adaptation of the series of books by Mairi Hedderwick. The programmes follow the adventures of Katie Morag whose life on the fictional Scottish island of Struay is full of stories of jealousy, bravery and rivalry and peopled by an annoying little brother, busy shopkeeper parents, a perfectly perfect best friend and a couple of grandmothers who between them know everything about everything. The series was produced by Move On Up with support from BBC Scotland and commissioned by the BBC's CBeebies and CBBC channels. It also airs on the BBC's Gaelic channel BBC Alba and BBC One Scotland. Don Coutts directed the series which Margaret Matheson produced and Lindy Cameron executive produced and edited. Katie Morag is also available on BBC iPlayer for over a year.
Mary MacPherson (née MacDonald), known as Màiri Mhòr nan Òran or simply Màiri Mhòr, was a Scottish Gaelic poet from the Isle of Skye, whose contribution to Scottish Gaelic literature is focused heavily upon the Highland Clearances and the Crofters War; the Highland Land League's campaigns of rent strikes and other forms of direct action. Although she could read her own work when it was written down, she could not write it down herself. She retained her songs and poems in her memory and eventually dictated them to others, who wrote them down for publication. She often referred to herself as Màiri Nighean Iain Bhàin, the name by which she would have been known in the Skye of her childhood.
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