SARAH HAYES
BIOGRAPHY
Sarah Hayes was born in Oxford in 1945 and brought up in
Cambridge. She did not become a scientist like her sister
and brother, or her father and grandfather, who both won
Nobel prizes. She read English at London University and
went into publishing - like her American mother, from whom
she inherited a love of children's books, novels, and pigs.
For several years Sarah worked for Victor Gollancz, but
soon after the first of her three children was born, she
and her husband, Richard, moved to the country and Sarah
went freelance.
While the children were growing up, Sarah read manuscripts,
edited fiction, lectured adults on nineteenth and twentieth
century novels, set up a school lending library, ran pet
shows, learned to do etching and screen-printing, took A
Level Art Textiles, and reviewed teenage fiction for The
Times Literary Supplement and biographies for The Economist.
In 1983 Sebastian Walker (founder of Walker Books) commissioned
Sarah to write twelve small collections of fairy-tales to
sell in Sainsbury's. Since then she has written numerous
books for children, including the This is the Bear series,
The Grumpalump and three books she also illustrated - Nine
Ducks Nine, The Cats of Tiffany Street and Lucy Anna and
the Finders. In 2001 the stripey pig-like monsters she created
for Lucy Anna and the Finders were transmogrified, with
Sarah's help, into BBC television's Fimbles. However, the
greedy Finders and the innocent, childlike Fimbles could
not co-exist and all unsold copies of Lucy Anna and the
Finders including the complete paperback edition were pulped.
Although she loves the solitude of being a writer and illustrator,
Sarah has always been involved in her community. Following
ten years as co-ordinator of a large youth theatre, she
set up a charity which aims to create an arts centre in
the market town of Thame in Oxfordshire where she lives.
She also co-ordinated two large local arts festivals which
staged events from carnival to opera to an exhibition of
light sculptures and silk batik banners on the Town Hall.
Always ready to go on to the next thing, Sarah used her
Fimbles money to take a sabbatical from children's books.
She is at the end of a two-year course in writing for grownups
at Oxford University Department of Continuing Education.
This has involved exciting new kinds of writing, from sonnet
sequences to stage plays, but the exams have come as rather
a shock.
Sarah fears she cannot put off finishing the novel any
longer. Meanwhile she goes on writing and drawing for children
and is hugely looking forward to the birth of her first
grandchild. In order to fill their empty nest, she and Richard
(who runs a large book production company) have just acquired
two peacocks, Enid and Perce, to join Cleo, the cat and
Gus, the parrot.
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