Shirley was born on July 16^th 1927, in West Kirby, Wirral. Her father TJ Hughes, who owned the Liverpool department store of the same name, died when Shirley was five. She and her two sisters were brought up by their mother, Kathleen, and in their quiet suburban home, with time to fill, she developed her love for storytelling from an early age: drawing pictures, making up stories and putting on plays.

She left school at 16 to study fashion drawing at Liverpool College of Art, before going to the Ruskin in Oxford – she chose Oxford, she said, because she had heard (wrongly) that there was an ice rink there.
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On graduating, she came to London to embark on a career in illustration. She remembered it as a lonely, difficult time, but nevertheless she persisted. And then, a lucky break… after a rejected effort drawing ponies (‘lumpy and somehow misshapen’), she was commissioned to illustrate The Hill War by Olivia Fitz. At last, she was on her way. There followed a prolific period illustrating books for other authors, most notably Dorothy Edwards, who wrote My Naughty Little Sister.
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All this time, her own ideas were brewing. Shirley wrote and illustrated her first picture book, Lucy and Tom’s Day, in 1960. She had found what would become her core theme: warmly observed stories of the everyday sagas, joys and challenges of childhood, brought to life on the page with affection and humour.

In 1977, she created Dogger, one of her best-loved books, and the first to bring her to a much wider audience. A few years later, in 1981, a little boy comes running up the street, his mum and baby sister trundling along behind: Alfie and Annie Rose had arrived. The first story about Alfie, Alfie Gets in First, was followed by over twenty more. From 1985 onwards, she wrote and illustrated the Nursery Collection and other books about siblings Olly and Katie, this time for very young readers.

And there is much more to discover. Shirley created four larger format, more magical illustrated books for older children – Stories by Firelight (1993), Enchantment in the Garden (1996), The Lion and the Unicorn (1998), and Ella’s Big Chance (2003) – as well as two wartime novels, Hero on a Bicycle (2012) and Whistling in the Dark (2016), that she worked on at weekends after her husband of 55 years, John Vulliamy, died in 2007.

Shirley’s exceptional contribution to children’s books has been widely recognised. She was awarded the Kate Greenaway medal for Dogger in 1977, and again in 2003 for Ella’s Big Chance. Dogger was voted the ‘Greenaway of Greenaways’ in a 2007 poll of the country’s all-time favourite picture books. She received the Eleanor Farjeon award for services to children’s literature in 1984, and was the first winner of the BookTrust lifetime achievement award, in 2015. She was appointed OBE in 1999 and CBE in 2017.

She combined a sharp eye for detail with a spectacular flair for the bigger picture. While the little children in her illustrations are closely absorbed with the small but important things in their lives, the reader sees also a sweeping sky, an immense aerial view, or the sun setting behind an urban skyline, which would have been so familiar to Shirley: the view from her workroom window in Notting Hill, where she sat at her drawing board right up until the last weeks of her life.

Shirley died peacefully at home on February 25^th 2022, at the age of 94. She leaves behind a vast body of work, both familiar classics and unseen treasures. It is the universal, timeless quality of her stories that keep them as fresh as ever for generation after generation of young readers and families: comforting, reassuring, and entertaining.