Obituary: Barbara Firth

Barbara Firth

1928 – 2013

David Lloyd, her publisher at Walker Books writes …

Barbara Firth, who has died aged 84, was an illustrator of children’s books of great sensitivity, insight, humour and imagination.  Her best-known works were probably the five Little Bear books, written by Martin Waddell, of which the first, Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear?, won the Smarties Book Prize and the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1988, and is as perfect a picture-book as anyone could hope to make. Barbara was modest to a fault, a lover of animals and nature generally, a woman of strong will, however gently she might apply it.  She told the truth in a distinctive warm and quiet way; she did not write her own stories, but a perfect sense of story informed every line of her drawing.