Jill Barklem author page

Jill Barklem biography

Jill Barklem was a British children’s author and illustrator who created the Brambly Hedge books. She studied illustration at St Martin’s School of Art in London, developing the idea for Brambly Hedge while travelling on the London Underground from Epping to her art course. Her detailed fictional community of mice drew on extensive observation and research into the English countryside, traditional crafts, food production and rural machinery.

Collins published Barklem’s first four Brambly Hedge picture books, Spring Story, Summer Story, Autumn Story and Winter Story, in 1980. Each follows the mice of Brambly Hedge through a different season, with intricately illustrated homes, stores, workshops and landscapes forming an important part of the storytelling.

The series continued with The Secret Staircase in 1983, The High Hills in 1986, Sea Story in 1990 and Poppy’s Babies in 1994. Barklem researched the practical details behind her illustrations closely, including making food described in the stories and investigating how traditional mills, dairies and other machinery worked.

The Brambly Hedge books have sold more than seven million copies internationally and have been translated into numerous languages. The stories were also adapted for television using stop-frame animation, with the first adaptation broadcast in the UK on Christmas Day 1996. Barklem died in 2017, and her original eight Brambly Hedge stories remain in print through HarperCollins.