Dorothy Butler

(1925 - 2015)

Dorothy Butler attended Auckland Girls’ Grammar School, where she later worked as an assistant to pay for university classes. She trained to be a schoolteacher and in 1962 established a collective preschool in Birkenhead; she later opened a children’s bookstore and wrote many children’s books herself while raising eight children. “When children are grown, they need to harbor memories of happiness—of those surging moments of happiness which belong to childhood alone,” she said in a 1977 interview. “I believe that parents, teachers, and other adults can help to provide these memories, and that the joyful experience of books can be part of the raw material.”