Best known of them is the time-slip novel Tom's Midnight Garden, which won the 1958 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, as the year's outstanding children's book by a British subject.
She passed the time there thinking about a canoe trip she had taken many years before, which became the inspiration for her first book, a 241-page novel Minnow on the Say, published by Oxford in 1955 with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone.
It won the annual Carnegie Medal and for the 70th anniversary celebration in 2007, a panel named it one of the top ten Medal-winning works, which composed the ballot for a public election of the nation's favourite,[8] in which Tom's Midnight Garden finished second in the vote, between two books that were about 40 years younger.
[9][b] Pearce wrote over thirty books, including A Dog So Small (1962), The Squirrel Wife (1971), The Battle of Bubble and Squeak (1978) and The Way To Sattin Shore (1983).
[4][a] The Battle of Bubble and Squeak inspired a two-part television adaptation in Channel 4's Talk, Write and Read series of educational programming.
Although not a prolific writer of full-length books, Pearce continued to work over subsequent years, as well as speaking at conferences, editing anthologies and writing short stories.
[12][13] Every September from 2008, the Philippa Pearce Lecture at Homerton College, Cambridge celebrates "excellence in writing for children and to emphasize its continuing vital importance."