NORTON, Mary

“Stories never really end. They can go on and on and on. It's just that sometimes, at a certain point, one stops telling them.”

Children’s author and creator of fantasy worlds in which beds became transports of delight, and miniature people live undetected in the homes of “human beans”.  During WWII Mary Norton went with her children to New York, and whilst there she wrote down the stories she was telling them, publishing her first book The Magic Bed Knob in 1943 (UK edition published in 1945) She returned to the UK after the war, and published the follow up novel Bonfires and Broomsticks in 1947.   The two stories, following the adventures of three children and an amateur witch, were  published as a single volume, Bed-Knob and Broomstick in 1957 and filmed by Disney as Bedknobs and Broomsticks in 1971.  Her most famous book, The Borrowers (1952) introduced the tiny Clock family and their interactions with the big people they live alongside.  The novel won the Library Associations’ Carnegie Medal for outstanding children’s fiction and became an instant classic. (In 2007, Carnegie also voted The Borrowers as one of its top ten children’s books.)  There were four further titles in the series following the adventures of the Burrowers as they leave the safety of the big house. 

The series has been adapted for both television and the big screen several times.

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