Mrs Calder and the Hyena

Marjorie Ann Watts trained as a painter and illustrator with Edward Ardizzone and Harold Jones, then worked as an art editor and typographer. She worked as an illustrator (on books such as Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams), before beginning to write and illustrate her own books for children. She has also written a novel and a guide to European painting for young people. Her father was a Punch cartoonist and graphic artist; her grandmother founded PEN International, as well as writing several volumes of poetry and twenty novels. She lives in London.

‘Mrs Calder is frail and distracted. She annoys her daughter by living in disorder, taking up with vagrants, hanging around churchyards and giving free rein to her imagination (she thinks about her doctor with no clothes on). But the real hindrances to right perception in this tale, and throughout Marjorie Ann Watts’s exhilarating second collection, produced at the tender age of ninety-eight, are not the fantasies by which we sustain ourselves but the suffocating illusions of others. Particularly those who want what’s best for us. Where is safe? Where can we start again? Whether in homes troubled by age and bereavement or foreign cities consumed by idealistic revolution, “there are no answers”, as Mrs Calder herself puts it, except to pick up these stories wherever we left off, and – gratefully – read on.’ – Will Eaves