COUNTRY OF BIRTH

Germany

INDUSTRY

Children’s literature

TOP ACHIEVEMENTS

Judith Kerr is famous for her children’s books. Her early works include the Mog series and The Tiger Who Came to Tea, as well as the semi-autobiographical Out of the Hitler Time trilogy for young adults. The first book in the trilogy, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit tells the story of a family fleeing Nazi Germany from a little girl’s perspective, and it made the biggest impact.

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

Anna Judith Gertrud Helene Kerr was born in 1923 in Berlin, Germany. Her father was a well-known theater critic and her mother was a composer, both German Jews. Her family fled Germany in 1933 to escape the Nazis and spent brief stints in Switzerland and France before settling in England. During World War II, Judith worked for the Red Cross. She had left school at age 16 in order to get a job and help her parents eke out an income, but after the war she was awarded a scholarship for the Central School of Arts and Crafts so she returned to school.

EARLY CAREER

Judith was working as a script editor and writer for the BBC when she met her husband, Nigel “Tom” Kneale at the canteen. They married in 1954 and had two children. She only started writing and illustrating children’s books after her own children began to read. She specifically wrote When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit so her children, who lived a vastly different lifestyle than she did when she was young, could understand where she was coming from.

RECOGNITION

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, the first book in the Out of the Hitler Time trilogy, won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1974. In 2012, Judith was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to children's literature and Holocaust education. In May 2019, a week before her death, she was nominated as illustrator of the year at the British Book Awards.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

• Judith’s husband, Nigel, died in 2006, and she said that after his death writing became more important to her than ever. Two of her famous books published in that time period include Twinkles, Arthur and Puss and One Night in the Zoo.
• Judith Kerr died in May 2019 following a brief illness.
• The Judith Kerr Primary School in Herne Hill, London, was named after her in 2013.
• In her first book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, many interpreted the tiger as an analogy for the Gestapo. Kerr refuted this many times, saying, “It’s just the story of a tiger who came to tea. I made it up to amuse my children because we were bored and because their father was away filming for very long days at a time.”