Anne Wood

Anne Wood CBE (born 1 December 1937) is an English children’s television producer, responsible for co-creating Teletubbies with Andrew Davenport.

She was born in Spennymoor, County Durham, England, and grew up in Tudhoe Colliery, a small coal-mining village nearby.

Teaching

She qualified as a secondary school teacher through the Bingley Training College in Yorkshire and took up her first teaching post back home in Spennymoor. She married Barrie Wood in 1959 and moved to Surbiton in Surrey where she took up a teaching role at Hollyfield Road Secondary School.

This was the era of the first children’s paperback book and Anne became an early pioneer of a children’s paperback book club scheme for schools set up by Scholastic Publications. She retired from teaching on the birth of her daughter and was taken on by Scholastic as editor of their Children’s Book Club.

Children’s books

When the Wood family moved to Byfleet in Surrey, she expanded her interest in how books and children’s development could be brought together. In 1965 she founded and edited a quarterly magazine Books for Your Children, a publication aimed at parents, teachers and librarians and fully supported by children’s publishers. Initially the UK Arts Council supported the magazine with a small financial grant. As a further promotion of children’s books in 1969 Wood set up the Federation of Children's Book Groups, an organisation still in existence today. Also in 1969 in recognition of her contribution to the promotion of children’s books Wood was awarded the Eleanor Farjeon Award.