Mairi Hedderwick

[2] After graduating she married Ronnie Hedderwick on 24 June 1962,[1] and worked for two years as a travelling art teacher in Mid Argyll, qualifying at Jordanhill College of Education.

[1][6] The couple then spent eighteen months working respectively as a dairymaid and a cattleman on a large farm estate at Applecross in Wester Ross;[7] but in 1965,[8] three months after the birth of her first child, Mark Hedderwick,[9] 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.

The couple had planned to make a living tending lobster pots and keeping a few sheep and cattle, but Hedderwick began using her artistic skills to supplement the family income, teaching in the local school, selling pictures to tourists, and in 1969 starting a printing business called the Malin Workshop producing postcards and calendars with drawings of wildlife and maps of the islands,[9][11][12] initially all hand-printed without electricity.

[13][14] A visitor she met on the beach one day turned out to be an editor at Macmillan Books; showing off the nearby house full of her watercolours, she was soon signed up as a contract illustrator for the company, winning an in-house contest to illustrate a version by Rumer Godden of The Old Woman who lived in a Vinegar Bottle (1972), and then three children's books featuring Janet Reachfar by the established Scottish author Jane Duncan.

[15] Another four Katie Morag books followed, but increasingly Hedderwick began to find herself becoming a not-entirely-willing tourist attraction on Coll in her own right,[2] and after almost ten years she felt it was time to move on.

(Hamish Hamilton, 1992), a novel about the students of a small rural one-teacher primary school trying to save it from closure; and Tom Pow's Calum's Big Day (Iynx Publishing, 2000), a knockabout exploration of Scottish identity for five-year-olds.