Her final wish was that instead of attending a funeral service for her, mourners read to children.
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Anna Dewdney, the best-selling children’s author and illustrator behind the popular “Llama Llama” series, once wrote that “empathy is as important as literacy”.
Dewdney battled brain cancer for 15 months.
Dewdney began to gain success in the 1990s as the illustrator of “The Peppermint Race” by Dian Curtis Regan and other children’s books. Her 2005 book “Llama Llama Red Pajama”, about the anxiety of bedtime and separation, began a series that frequented the New York Times Best Sellers lists.
Dewdney told the Putney Post how she got the idea to tell stories about a llama.
The “Llama, Llama” now features more than 10 books, which have sold more than 10 million copies combined. Anna recently completed a new picture book, Little Excavator, which will be out in June 2017, and an animated “Llama Llama” series will premiere on Netflix in 2017. “We will miss her so, but consider ourselves so lucky to be her publishing family and her partner in her legacy”, Jen Loja, president of Penguin Young Readers, said in a statement.
“When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language”, Dewdney wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2013. “When we read a book with children, [they] are drawn out of themselves to bond with other human beings, and to see and feel the experiences of others”.
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The author’s biography on the official Llama Llama website described her as “an outspoken advocate of literacy” and “mom to two away-from-home daughters and three stay-at-home dogs”.
