Dumpling (Cartwheels)

Dumpling wishes she was long and sausage-shaped like her two brothers and other dachshunds, instead of being short and stumpy. One day she goes to the woods and meets a witch's cat who grants Dumpling her wish, but the spell goes wrong and Dumpling gets longer and longer! She's very happy to return to her own shape again.

Dick King-Smith served in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, and afterwards spent twenty years as a farmer in Gloucestershire, the county of his birth. Many of his stories are inspired by his farming experiences. Later he taught at a village primary school. His first book, The Fox Busters, was published in 1978. He wrote a great number of children's books, including The Sheep-Pig (winner of the Guardian Award and filmed as Babe), Harry's Mad, Noah's Brother, The Hodgeheg, Martin's Mice, Ace, The Cuckoo Child and Harriet's Hare (winner of the Children's Book Award in 1995). At the British Book Awards in 1991 he was voted Children's Author of the Year. In 2009 he was made OBE for services to children's literature. Dick King-Smith died in 2011 at the age of eighty-eight.