Martin Waddell

For his "lasting contribution" as a children's writer Waddell received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2004.

The biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award, conferred by the International Board on Books for Young People, is the highest career recognition available to a writer or illustrator of children's books. Waddell received the writing award in 2004.

An omnibus edition of the first four books was published for Borders in 2001.

Waddell and Firth won the Kurt Maschler Award, AKA the Emil, for The Park in the Dark (Walker, 1989). From 1982 to 1999, the award annually recognised one British "work of imagination for children, in which text and illustration are integrated so that each enhances and balances the other."

He also writes under the pen name Catherine Sefton for older children, primarily ghost stories and mystery fiction. The work by Sefton most widely held in WorldCat libraries is the novel In a Blue Velvet Dress (1972).

In 1972, he went into a church to stop some vandals and got caught up in an explosion in Donaghadee—an experience that took him years to overcome. As an author, nearly all of Waddell's stories are inspired by events or places in his life at the foot of the Mourne Mountains. As he wryly claimed, "I've been blown up, buried alive and had cancer as an adult, and survived all these experiences, so I'm a very lucky man."

When it became clear his future did not lie in professional football, Waddell turned to his other love and began to write (he would later combine the two in the Napper series of football-centred children's books). Originally, he wrote for adults; his first real success was a comic thriller, Otley, which was made into a film starring Tom Courtenay and Romy Schneider. After moving back to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, he wrote books that reflected on the changing situation in his native land. Soon his love of storytelling would pull him into writing children's literature.

Martin Waddell (born 10 April 1941) is a writer of children's books from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He may be known best for his picture book texts featuring anthropomorphic animals, especially the Little Bear series illustrated by Barbara Firth (not to be confused with Minarik & Sendak's Little Bear series).