Granny the Pag

Nina Bawden was born in Ilford in 1925. During World War II she was evacuated to Wales, an experience which informed her 1973 children’s classic Carrie’s War. She studied PPE at Oxford’s Somerville College and began writing during her first marriage, while her babies slept. She wrote freely for both children and adults, publishing nearly fifty books, ‘making use of all my life, all memory, wasting nothing.’ In fact, her life was full of drama and incident: she divorced her first husband after meeting her second on a bus, her son Nikki drowned after years of incarceration due to his struggles with schizophrenia, Nina lost her second husband in the Potters Bar railcrash in 2002. When she died in 2012, most of her books were still in print.