Mairi Hedderwick

Mairi Hedderwick (born 2 May 1939) is a Scottish illustrator and author, best known for the Katie Morag series of children's picture books set on the Isle of Struay, a fictional counterpart of the real-life inner Hebridean island of Coll where Hedderwick has lived at various times for much of her life.

She has also written several books of travel writing for adults, and is the illustrator of a growing range of Hebridean stationery.

Mairi Crawford Lindsay was born in Gourock on 2 May 1939, the daughter of Douglas Lindsay, an architect who died suddenly when she was thirteen, and Margaret Crawford; she is the granddaughter of the Scottish missionary Dan Crawford.

She was educated at Gourock primary school and then at the independent St Columba's School for Girls in nearby Kilmacolm, but describes her childhood in the strict Christian household as "serious, very lonely", always feeling out of place. Instead she longed for the kind of carefree existence she would later depict in the Katie Morag stories, and used to wish herself "over the hills and far away" beyond the Cowal hills that she could see behind Kirn and Dunoon on the far side of the Firth of Clyde.

In 1957, she went to Edinburgh College of Art, studying mural painting and ceramics, where she noticed an advertisement for a mother's help on the Isle of Coll. She went to the island for the first time that year, and then came back every summer of her student vacations.

After graduating she married Ronnie Hedderwick on 24 June 1962, and worked for two years as a travelling art teacher in Mid Argyll, qualifying at Jordanhill College of Education. The couple then spent eighteen months working respectively as a dairymaid and a cattleman on a large farm estate at Applecross in Wester Ross; but in 1965, three months after the birth of her first child, Mark Hedderwick, they moved to Coll, where they bought Crossapol, an isolated 19th-century farmhouse at the southern end of the island, with a big Rayburn stove and oil and gas lamps and a well, but neither electricity nor running water nor permanent road access, three miles from the next nearest house, at the end of a mile and a half of white sand beach. There the family lived for ten years, raising their two children Mark and Tammie.

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