Mary Rayner, writer and illustrator acclaimed for her series of pig picture books – obituary

Mary Rayner, who has died aged 89, was an author and illustrator who hit her stride when pigs replaced sheep as animals of choice in children’s picture books.

She was best known for her pencil drawings for Dick King-Smith’s The Sheep-Pig (1983), later adapted for the big screen as Babe (1995), the Hollywood blockbuster which won several Academy Award nominations.

But she also created her own series of humorous pig picture books (Mr & Mrs Pig’s Evening Out, Mrs Pig’s Bulk Buy and so on) featuring Mr and Mrs Pig and their 10 piglets. Their adventures were pitched to appeal to young children and strike a chord with their parents – as when the piglets all pile into Mr and Mrs Pig’s bed during the night, or when Mrs Pig decides to break her piglets’ addiction to tomato ketchup by serving them nothing else.

Stories such as Garth Pig and the Ice Cream Lady featured a young piglet who is always getting into trouble, some escapades featuring Madame Lupino, a wolf who always tries to kidnap Garth, but somehow, often thanks to his siblings, never quite manages it.

There were suggestions that the theme of a family pulling together in dire circumstances, albeit comically, drew on Mary Rayner’s own experiences of childhood, which she movingly described in a late-life memoir, No More Tigers, in 2020.

She was born Mary Yoma Grigson on December 30 1933 in Mandalay, colonial Burma, where members of her family had lived for several generations; her father Aubrey worked for the Bombay Burmah Trading Company.

Her memoir described an idyllic colonial childhood before the war, but began with the words: “When I was eight, I walked out of Burma…” When the Japanese invaded in 1942 her mother, Yoma, took Mary and her two siblings, Ann and Stephen, and walked over the mountains to the safety of India, leaving their father behind as a member of the Allied forces fighting the Japanese. Three months later Aubrey was killed.

The family settled in the small south Indian hill station of Kotagiri, and Mary attended the Nazareth Convent, Ootacamund. Returning to Britain in 1945, she was educated at St Swithun’s School, Winchester, then took a degree in English at the University of St Andrews. She worked as a copywriter with the publisher Longmans, giving up in 1962 after marrying the psychoanalyst Eric Rayner.

Her first book, The Witch-Finder (1975), featured a young girl whose mother has fallen under the spell of strange standing stones near their home. It conveyed an unsettling atmosphere very different from the comforting happy family theme of her pig books, the first of which, Mr and Mrs Pig’s Evening Out (for which she had done a course in children’s book illustration at Chelsea School of Art), was published in 1976.

She wrote and illustrated the pig books (seven picture books in all and several more short stories) for her own three children, though by the time she published her last they had all grown up and left home.

Mary Rayner’s other illustration commissions included Dick King-Smith’s Daggie Dogfoot (1980) and Magnus Powermouse (1982), and Anita Briggs’s Hobart, about a trio of performing pigs. As an author and illustrator her other books include Reilly (1987), the story of a streetwise alley cat, and The Echoing Green (1992).

Her marriage to Eric Rayner was dissolved and in 1985 she married Adrian Hawkesley, a public relations consultant. They settled in Wiltshire, where she turned her energies from book illustration to painting in watercolours and later oils and collage, and was a keen gardener.

Her husband died in 2009, and in 2013 she moved to Hove to be nearer her daughter, the author and novelist Sarah Rayner.

Mary Rayner is survived by Sarah and by two sons.

Mary Rayner, born December 30 1933, died February 27 2023