"The Tiger Who Came To Tea" is a short children's story, first published in 1968, written and illustrated by Judith Kerr

Judith Kerr

Judith Kerr is a German-born British writer and illustrator who has created both enduring picture books such as the Mog series and The Tiger Who Came To Tea and acclaimed novels for older children such as the autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit which give a child's-eye view of the...

. The book concerns a girl called Sophie, her mother, and an anthropomorphised

Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is any attribution of human characteristics to animals, non-living things, phenomena, material states, objects or abstract concepts, such as organizations, governments, spirits or deities. The term was coined in the mid 1700s...

 tiger

Tiger

The tiger is the largest cat species, reaching a total body length of up to and weighing up to . Their most recognizable feature is a pattern of dark vertical stripes on reddish-orange fur with lighter underparts...

 who interrupts their afternoon tea. The book remains extremely popular forty years after it was first published, and a theatrical adaptation of the story has been produced. A Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 fan page dedicated to the book has over 20,000 fans as of July 2010.

The original artwork for the book is held by Seven Stories

Seven Stories

Seven Stories the national centre for children's Books in the United Kingdom is based in the Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle upon Tyne, close to the city's newly regenerated quayside...

, a children's literature centre in the U.K.

Plot

A little girl named Sophie is having tea with her mother in their kitchen. Soon they are joined for tea by a tiger who drinks all the tea, eats all the food in the house and drinks everything, even draining the water from the taps, so that Sophie cannot have her bath. Then he leaves. Sophie's father comes home and suggests that they all go out and have a lovely meal in a cafe. The following day Sophie and her mother go out to buy some more food, including a big tin of tiger food. But the tiger never returns.

Inspiration

Kerr first invented the story after visiting a zoo with her three year old daughter and told it many times before making it into a book. The book took a year to write and illustrate. The Tiger Who Came to Tea is one of the best selling children's books of all time.

Foreign language editions

This book has been produced in Braille. It is also published in German with the title Ein Tiger kommt zum Tee. It has been adapted into Welsh, entitled Y Teigr a Ddaeth i De. In this version, the little girl is renamed Catrin.

Theatre adaptation

The book has been adapted for stage with music by David Wood

David Wood (actor)

David Wood OBE is an English-born actor and writer, called "the National Children's Dramatist" by The Times.He was educated at Chichester High School For Boys and Worcester College, Oxford....

. The production features the actors Devon Black, Alan Atkins and Abbey Norman.

See also

• Mog (Judith Kerr)
  Mog (Judith Kerr)
  Mog the cat is the main character in a series of children's books written by Judith Kerr. Other regularly occurring characters include Mr and Mrs Thomas and their two children Nicky and Debbie. In each book Mog gets into a different conundrum with a new character or event...
  
  , a series of children's books by the same author.

External links

• Browse inside The Tiger Who Came to Tea at HarperCollins Publishers
• The Tiger Who Came To Tea, read with illustrations from the book