author
Helen Bannerman
1862–1946
Best known for creating The Story of Little Black Sambo, this Scottish children’s writer lived in India and drew on those years in some of her early books. Her work was hugely popular with young readers, even as its most famous title later became the center of lasting controversy.
1 Audiobook
The Story of Little Black Sambo, and The Story of Little Black Mingo
by Helen Bannerman
About the author
Born in Edinburgh in 1862, Helen Bannerman was a Scottish writer and illustrator of children’s books. She spent part of her childhood in Madeira, later studied through external examinations at the University of St Andrews, and married physician William Burney Bannerman.
She is most closely associated with The Story of Little Black Sambo, written and illustrated while she was living in Madras, India, at the end of the nineteenth century. The book became widely known internationally and helped fix her place in children’s literature.
At the same time, that fame is inseparable from the debates around the book’s racial stereotypes and its long, complicated afterlife. Bannerman died in Edinburgh in 1946, and she remains a figure remembered both for her success as a storyteller and for the controversy attached to her best-known work.