The Maplin Bird

Kathleen Wendy Herald Peyton (2 August 1929 – 19 December 2023), who wrote primarily as K. M. Peyton, was a British author of fiction for children and young adults in the 1960s and 1970s. Peyton wrote more than fifty novels in the including the Ruth Hollis series, the Pennington series, and the Flambards series, the latter about the Russell family which spanned the period before and after the First World War. For the Flambards series, Peyton won both the 1969 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association and the 1970 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, judged by a panel of British children's writers. In 1979, the Flambards trilogy was adapted by Yorkshire Television as a 13-part TV series, Flambards, starring Christine McKenna as the heroine Christina Parsons.