The magic of a special animal is perfectly captured in the heroic antics of Babe, a piglet with a difference. The runt of a litter, Babe arrives on the farm where is he trained by the sheep dog along with her own puppies. And Babe turns out to be a genius at it. His secret? Babe treats the sheep with courtesy and respect. A farmyard story with a difference, The Sheep-Pig is an exciting and unexpected adventure.
When Farmer Hogget wins a piglet at the local fair, Mrs Hogget thinks of fattening it up for the freezer. But the old sheepdog, Fly, takes him under her wing and starts to train him up as a sheep-pig, whose methods of getting the sheep to do what he wants are rather unconventional.
Dick King-Smith was born in 1922 and brought up in Gloucestershire.
Dick served with the Grenadier Guards during World War II and was mentioned in dispatches. He then spent twenty years working as a farmer and a short period teaching in a primary school before becoming a full-time writer.
Dick wrote over seventy stories, many of which have animal characters for the simple reason that, "I like them, I've always kept a lot of pets, and because it's fun putting words in their mouths." His farming years were the inspiration for many of his books, and pigs have featured in several of them because they are his favourite animal. Dick won the 1984 Guardian Fiction Award for The Sheep-Pig, which was later turned into an Oscar-winning film, 'Babe'. He died in 2011.
