Judith Kerr awarded lifetime achievement prize at London zoo

Children’s author receives BookTrust award in the place where she was inspired to write The Tiger Who Came to Tea

The author and illustrator Judith Kerr, who escaped from Hitler’s Germany as a child and has gone on to write more than 30 children’s books, has received a lifetime achievement award at London zoo within a whisker of the big cats that inspired her picture book classic, The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

To the faint roars of real tigers, possibly descendants of the very beasts that inspired her first book, Kerr accepted the award on Wednesday with her trademark modesty and humour: “When a prize is given for a lifetime’s achievement, age is going to play a part and I may have an unfair advantage. Inevitably the judges must say: ‘She’s 93, she might not be around to give it to next year’, which is acutely unfair to young illustrators and authors in their 80s.”

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