Gunvor Edwards is a Swedish artist, best known for her work as an illustrator of a generation of books for children from David Thomson’s Danny Fox to Enid Blyton’s Tales from Fairyland, the Hallo Aurora series of books of Anne Cath. Vestly, and with husband Peter Edwards The Railway Series by the Reverend W. Audrey.
Gunvor was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1934. She was the second child of Oscar and Alma Ovden, a school professor and literary and arts critic respectively. Her sister Alvan, 14 years older, was to become an author and through marriage the co-founder of the Stromberg publishing business in Stockholm Sweden.
Gunvor’s career began as a student of Swedish abstract artist Gun Setterdahl. Her first jobs included – with sparse glamour – painting scenery at the Stockholm Opera, and later in the United Kingdom at the Little Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate for Dame Marie Rambert.
She first met Peter, her life-long husband to be, at Art School in London in the 1950s. They were married at Stockholm’s Town Hall in May of 1957, and spent their first years of marriage working in Sweden, living in the Baltic port town of Sodertalje with Gunvor’s parents.
Gunvor and Peter returned to the United Kingdom in the late 1950s, and quickly began establishing themselves as artists anew with publishers and authors there. They also began establishing a family. Martina, their first child, was born in 1960. Soon followed Adrian, then Josephine, Gavin, Tamsin, and finally Per-Anders (Pelle) – the only one of their children to be born in Sweden.
Between the 1960s and 1980s, they lived in Hackney, Stansted Mountfichet, Machynlleth, Blackheath, and Greenwich. In 1985 the family home moved back to East Anglia, to Blue House Farm, Wix, in an area of Britain that has over several centuries attracted artists and musicians.
Religion was also an enduring companion for Gunvor. She had converted to Roman Catholicism in the late 1950s, and a number of her books were published for the Church. With Peter, she made friends with a number of priests, particularly in the days of Vatican II, and they became part of a small community of Catholics, looking after their local church in Stansted.
Although the United Kingdom remained Gunvor’s adopted home throughout her life, she kept in close contact with family and friends in Sweden. She and Peter travelled there most summers, and her work and thinking continued to be strongly influenced by Scandinavian design and other traits. Spontaneity, lightness, humour, a quiet rebelliousness and mischief, a delight in storytelling, and a love for good food “Well, maybe just another tiny slivver please” are all traits that her family associate with her.
Her six children are today flourishing near and far. Martina is an art tutor in East Anglia, Adrian is a spokesman at the UN in Geneva and former BBC correspondent, Josephine is a practice nurse and dancer in London, Gavin is a leading Natural Horn player in UK orchestras, Tamsin is a TV producer, and Per works in California as a Software Developer for artists.
Gunvor died on 23 April 2014, after a battle with dementia.
