Scottish writer, Sheila Burnford was born on May 11th 1918.
You may not be familiar with her, but Sheila went on to pen a book that was made into a film that was a firm family favourite, certainly in my household when growing up.
Born and educated in Edinburgh then Harrogate College in Yorkshire, England. During World War II Sheila married David Burnford, a surgeon in the Royal Navy, and in 1948 the Burnford family emigrated to Canada, settling at Port Arthur in western Ontario.
During the late 1940s and 1950s Sheila Burnford wrote scripts for puppet shows and contributed articles about Canada to UK magazines.
Burnford’s first book, The Incredible Journey, became a worldwide best-seller in 1961. It was awarded the Canadian Book of the Year for Children award and was made into a film I mentioned by the Walt Disney Studios in 1963. Other books by Burnford include The Fields of Noon, a collection of autobiographical essays; Without Reserve, observations of life among the Native Americans of Big Trout Lake in northern Ontario; One Woman’s Arctic, an account of her two-year sojourn among the Inuit of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic; Mr. Noah and the Second Flood, a book well ahead of it's time telling a cautionary ecological tale about the threats of pollution.
The family returned to England in later life and settled in the wee village of Buckler's Hard Hampshire, where she died of lung cancer at her home on April 20, 1984 aged 65.
Read about Sheila Burnford here https://sites.google.com/site/theincrediblejourneylis514/sheila-burnford?fbclid=IwAR1cdCjCFyOFSaSETnJTTLgWXV_Q6tgf8eNe9FtcAvmD4uHtU0RKx_jKo5U
