Picture book publisher behind a new generation of children’s classics at Walker Books
For the last quarter century, Deirdre McDermott, who has died aged 60 of cancer, was the driving creative force behind the outstanding range of publications for children from Walker Books. The body of work that she had inherited and added to came from figures such as Helen Oxenbury, John Burningham, Maurice Sendak, Lauren Child, Allan Ahlberg, Michael Rosen, Bob Graham, Anita Jeram, David McKee, David Roberts, Oliver Jeffers, Ken Wilson-Max and Júlia Sardà.
Possessed of an uncanny eye for spotting new talent, in recent years Dee discovered the Mexican author and illustrator Flavia Z Drago, now a No 1 New York Times bestseller; Forest Xiao – the winner of the 2026 Klaus Flugge prize with her book Seven Babies; and Chloe Savage, whose book The Search for the Giant Arctic Jellyfish won the illustrated category in the Waterstones children’s book of the year in 2024.
When Sebastian Walker had founded the firm in 1978, he recruited the art director Amelia Edwards and editor Wendy Boase. Dee moved from Dublin to London to join it in 1989 as a junior paperback designer, at a particularly exciting time. The company had recently brought out the first of Martin Handford’s Where’s Wally? books, with Lucy Cousins’ Maisy series in the pipeline, and there was a substantial budget available for new projects.
Her first three years were spent as a design assistant to Edwards, and she also learnt much from David Lloyd, the editor of Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Dee worked on the original layouts for Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson’s Owl Babies (1992) – a title that went on to sell more than 6.2m copies worldwide.
Sebastian Walker died in 1991, and left control of the company to its employees: it became the largest worker-owned publishing business in the UK, and ownership was also shared with the artists and authors. Boase died in 1999, and Edwards retired in 2001.
The following year Dee became the firm’s picture book publisher, and maintained a working culture centred on continuous learning and mentorship within her team. Her passion was always for very young, “preverbal” stories, where children could understand what was going on without being able to read. She especially loved Oxenbury’s artwork and would often take out copies of her board books Clap Hands and Tickle Tickle and marvel: “Look at them – how simple and how warm.”
Dee and I met at the Bologna book fair in 2009, and she began publishing my work, drawn by its use of colour and expressive characters. She was attracted to illustrations that would communicate to the youngest children. “Can we make it younger?” she often said to me. “That’s the gold.”
Her instincts were correct: A Bit Lost (2010) was followed by Oh No, George! (2012). They and those that followed have been translated into 40 languages worldwide.
She saw her job as a vocation, a kind of bulwark to fend off commercial pressures and create a space to make high-quality, lovingly crafted books. “We’ll manoeuvre,” was her catchphrase.
Emotional honesty was something that she viewed as essential: that the characters must have agency, that their responses must feel authentic. “Stories show us how to be,” she said: we don’t just identify with the characters, we become them. Their compass becomes our compass, our core.
She championed space, both white space on the page and the invisible space left for the reader’s imagination to expand and interpret the story in their own way. It was a bookmaker’s job, she would say, to work between the words and the pictures, to read the text aloud, editing by ear and assessing how this interacts on the page with what we see in the pictures.
Dee found a kindred spirit in the Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation in Hong Kong, working to support childhood literacy. Among the many picture book artists from around the world who benefited from their collaboration was Zhu Cheng-Liang, from China. Yu Li-Qiong’s book A New Year’s Reunion, illustrated by Zhu, found a new international following after Walker Books took it up in 2011. It was followed in 2019 by Mary Murphy’s What I Like Most.
Born in Dublin, Dee was the daughter of Carmel (nee Brady), a bookkeeper, and Liam McDermott, a primary school headmaster. From Loreto College, St Stephen’s Green, she went to the National College of Art and Design, graduating in visual communication in 1988.
Then she went to Walker, where many of the books she art directed and published won awards in children’s publishing, including the Carnegie Medal for illustration. It is judged by UK librarians, and Walker won it six times in her tenure as publisher. Most recently, Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s Oh Dear, Look What I Got! (2025) won the children’s nonfiction and illustrated category at the British Book awards.
Dee was curious about everything, people most of all. It often felt as if she was looking at people as the children they used to be, and she readily connected with them.
In 2025 she married the percussionist Tony Maronie. He survives her, along with her father, her brothers, Rónán and Sean, her sister Orla, and her nephews and nieces, Ciarán, Cormac, Dervla, Conn, Anna, Emmet and Tara.
