The Invisible Dog and The Sheep Pig bind-up

Description

Dick King-Smith - Number One for animal magic! In The Invisible Dog a little girl tries to satisfy her yearning for a dog by introducing an imaginary Great Dane called Henry to the house. Then her wish comes true and she is allowed a real Henry - but there's more than a hint that old Mrs Garrow, with her cackling laugh and black cat, may have had something to do with it... In The Sheep-Pig Farmer Hoggett thinks the piglet he wins at the fair is just one to be fattened up for the freezer until his old sheepdog, Fly, takes Babe under her wing and starts to train him to be a sheepdog too. Babe's methods are unconventional but successful and he wins the Grand Challenge Trials by being polite to his flock of sheep.

Dick King-Smith served in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, and afterwards spent twenty years as a farmer in Gloucestershire, the county of his birth. Many of his stories are inspired by his farming experiences. Later he taught at a village primary school. His first book, The Fox Busters, was published in 1978. He wrote a great number of children's books, including The Sheep-Pig (winner of the Guardian Award and filmed as Babe), Harry's Mad, Noah's Brother, The Hodgeheg, Martin's Mice, Ace, The Cuckoo Child and Harriet's Hare (winner of the Children's Book Award in 1995). At the British Book Awards in 1991 he was voted Children's Author of the Year. In 2009 he was made OBE for services to children's literature. Dick King-Smith died in 2011 at the age of eighty-eight.