NEED TO KNOW
British children’s author Allan Ahlberg has died at age 87
The writer was best known for his collaborations with his wife, the late illustrator Janet Ahlberg
The couple published over 30 books together, including Peepo! and Each Peach Pear Plum
Children’s book author Allan Ahlberg, best known for his celebrated collaborations with his illustrator wife Janet, has died. He was 87.
The author’s death was confirmed by his publisher Penguin Random House, according to the BBC and The Independent.
Ahlberg was born in the South London town of Croydon in 1938. As a baby, he was adopted and raised in a working class family in England’s West Midlands region. After leaving school, Ahlberg worked a variety of jobs, including as a mailman and a gravedigger. When the superintendent of Oldbury’s parks and cemeteries heard that he was an A-level student, he suggested that Ahlberg become a teacher instead.
Ahlberg attended the Sunderland Teacher Training College in the 1960s, where he met his wife Janet.
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Allan Ahlberg
“If I hadn’t met Janet there, I might never have been able to become a writer,” Ahlberg told The Independent in 2006. They married in 1969, and worked as a teacher and illustrator respectively, until Janet suggested that Ahlberg should write a story to go with her artwork.
“It turned out that this was the sort of writing I could do,” Ahlberg said in a 2006 interview with The Guardian. “It was just like having a baby really. You fuss over the book and are very protective. Criticism — ‘your baby has a big nose’ — hurts … and you don’t begrudge the other parent their genetic input.”
After a slew of rejections, the couple eventually published early titles including The Old Joke Book (1976) and Burglar Bill and The Vanishment of Thomas Tull, both published in 1977. The Ahlbergs soon became known for their nursery stories, and published numerous celebrated titles in Britain, like Each Peach Pear Plum (1978) and the Funnybones and the Jolly Postman series.
The couple also published the beloved 1981 children’s book Peepo!, which drew upon Ahlberg’s childhood in the West Midlands.
Writer Pictures via AP Images
Allan Ahlberg in 2008
”It interested us to see what fun you could have with a baby’s shifting perspective and adapting drawings to fit,” Ahlberg said of the book to The Sydney Morning Herald in 2011. The birth of the couple’s daughter, Jessica, would also inspire later books like The Baby’s Catalogue (1982).
Throughout their career, the Ahlbergs published over 30 books together, until Janet’s death from breast cancer in 1994 at age 50. In 1997, Ahlberg compiled Janet’s Last Book in her memory.
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Ahlberg later married Vanessa Clarke, his editor at Walker Books. He would collaborate with more illustrators on future projects, including Bruce Ingman and Raymond Briggs, and also worked with Jessica on titles like Half a Pig (2004) and The Goldilocks Variations (2012). The pair would also collaborate on Ahlberg’s 2013 memoir The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood.
Ahlberg himself published over 100 books; his final book, Under the Table, was published in the U.S. in 2024.
“I’m far from being the best writer in the world, and Janet was very good but she wasn’t the greatest illustrator in the world either,” Ahlberg recalled to The Guardian in 2011. “But the pair of us were twins in the sense that we both really wanted our books to be good.”
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