Allan Ahlberg, an introvert who became a beloved author of blithesome, best-selling children’s books through collaborations with his wife, Janet Ahlberg, and other illustrators, died on July 29 in England. He was 87.
His death was announced by his publisher, Penguin Random House, which did not identify a specific location or a cause.
As a young man, Mr. Ahlberg held a series of solitary jobs, including digging graves. “I was looking for a job in the open air where they left you alone,” he told the British newspaper The Independent in 2008.
“I became a gravedigger by a process of elimination,” he said. “I had been a plumber’s mate, a soldier and a postman.”
But he fantasized about becoming a writer.
“I had all the romantic notions of the white suit and the panama hat,” he said in a 2006 interview with The Guardian. “All the Somerset Maugham images without any words to support them.”
It wasn’t until he was 22, and attending Sunderland Teacher Training College (now part of the University of Sunderland), that he met Janet Hall, his future wife, and was inspired to fulfill his dream.
The couple married in 1969, and Ms. Ahlberg, an artist who was tired of designing do-it-yourself crafts books, urged him to write a story that she could illustrate. What followed was a five-decade career that yielded some 150 books. Before Ms. Ahlberg died of breast cancer at 50 in 1994, they collaborated on 37 of those books, including “Each Peach Pear Plum” (1978), “Peepo!” (1981), “The Jolly Postman” (1986) and “The Brick Street Boys” series, beginning in 1975.
Their collaboration was “one of the most important and enduring husband-and-wife partnerships in modern British children’s literature,” The Sydney Morning Herald wrote in 2011.
Still, the couple received their share of rejection slips — 18 months of them.
Then, in a single week, three manuscripts were accepted by different publishers: “The Old Joke Book” (1976), “The Vanishment of Thomas Tull” (1977) and “Burglar Bill” (1977).
“The Jolly Postman” was inspired by the couple’s infant daughter, Jessica, who amused herself by playing with the mail while sitting in her high chair. The book included miniature envelopes containing letters to the Big Bad Wolf and other fairy-tale favorites, including one from Goldilocks apologizing to the Three Bears for intruding.
“Each Peach Pear Plum” (published in the United States in 1979) and “The Jolly Christmas Postman” (1991) were awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal by the British Library Association, recognizing distinguished illustrated books for children. In 2007, “Each Peach” was named one of the top 10 works published during the medal’s first 50 years.
Two of Mr. Ahlberg’s books — “Funnybones” (1980), a collaboration with Ms. Ahlberg about a family of skeletons, and “Woof!” (1986), about a boy who turns into a dog, illustrated by Fritz Wegner — were adapted as television series in England.
In a 1991 article in The New York Times Book Review, Daniel Menaker wrote that in “The Jolly Christmas Postman,” a sequel that appeared on the Times’s best-seller list, “the authors have taken the secrets of the first book’s popularity — cleverness, detail, surprise and humor — and amplified them.”
After Ms. Ahlberg’s death ended their 20-year collaboration, Mr. Ahlberg worked with other illustrators, including Raymond Briggs, Bruce Ingman and his daughter, Jessica Ahlberg, who produced the drawings for “Half a Pig” (2004) and “The Goldilocks Variations” (2012).
In a recent tribute on X, Michael Rosen, an author and professor of children’s literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, wrote: “You were a pioneer of great children’s literature, both in picture books and poetry,” adding: “My children loved your books. So did and so do I.”
George Allan Ahlberg was born on June 5, 1938, to a single mother in Croydon, in South London. He grew up in West Midlands with adoptive parents who found him in an orphanage. His father was a laborer; his mother cleaned offices and homes.
“My parents loved me and they did me a huge service saving me from growing up in a children’s home,” Mr. Ahlberg recalled in The Guardian. “But there were a fair few clips round the ear, no books and not much conversation.”
He said that “Peepo!,” an illustrated book about a baby discovering the world, and “The Boyhood of Burglar Bill,” a 2006 book for older children, set in the early 1950s in West Midlands, were autobiographical.
At secondary school, he told The Independent in 2006, “My highest mark from my English teacher, Miss Scriven, was seven out of 20. This was because she gave marks for handwriting, spelling and punctuation, but when I wrote I was in a state of high excitement, so she was confronted with an inky mess.”
After graduating at 17 and doing three years of national service, Mr. Ahlberg was persuaded by his employer at the cemetery to overcome his shyness and become a primary schoolteacher. He attended the teachers’ college in Sunderland as preparation.
In 1997, Mr. Ahlberg collected his wife’s works in “Janet’s Last Book.” He chose a new publisher, Walker Books, and later married his editor there, Vanessa Clarke.
She survives him, along with his daughter, Jessica, and two stepdaughters, Saskia and Johanna.
Mr. Ahlberg, who wrote by hand in a shed in the garden of his Leicester home, summed up his style for The Guardian in 2006: “I like the word flabbergasted, I like the name Horace, and I seem to write quite a lot about sausages.” (Sausages figured prominently in “The Runaway Dinner,” a book published that year and illustrated by Mr. Ingman.)
In 2014, Mr. Ahlberg turned down a lifetime achievement award from Book Trust, a children’s reading charity, because it was sponsored by Amazon, which he believed was not paying its fair share of taxes. His last picture book, “Under the Table,” was published in 2023.
“Just because a book is tiny and its readers are little doesn’t mean it can’t be perfect,” Mr. Ahlberg told The Guardian in 2006. “On its own scale, it can be as good as Tolstoy or Jane Austen.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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