Mary Norton

The Borrowers are six inches tall, live under the kitchen floor, and get by on the things households are always losing: pins, stamps, a thimble for a cooking pot. Norton said the idea came from being very short-sighted as a child and spending a great deal of time close to the ground, looking at what was in the hedge. She had acted at the Old Vic, and wrote to support four children while her husband was away at war. It won the Carnegie Medal in 1952 and ran to five volumes.