Winnie-the-Pooh and the Royal Birthday

A new Winnie-the-Pooh book has been published to celebrate the joint 90th birthday of the much-loved bear and The Queen

New Winnie The Pooh story
Annunciata Elwes's avatar
By
published
in Features

When Winnie-the-Pooh made his debut in 1926, the initial story was dedicated to the newborn Princess Elizabeth. Now, to celebrate their joint 90th birthday, The Queen and the philosophical, honey-eating bear are reunited in a new adventure, which also features Prince George.

Winnie-the-Pooh and the Royal Birthday sees Pooh, Piglet, Christopher Robin and Eeyore travel to London, where Piglet wonders what the Queen’s Guard keep under their bearskins (‘Perhaps a little something to nibble on,’ suggests Pooh).

They are to deliver a special present to The Queen: one of Pooh’s famous ‘hum’ songs. The lively Prince is described as ‘much younger than Christopher Robin and almost as bouncy as Tigger’. He tickles Pooh’s ears and Piglet gives him a red balloon.

The story, which is free to download, was written by Jane Riordan and illustrated in the style of E. H. Shepard by Mark Burgess, who did the first authorised Winnie-the-Pooh sequel in 2009, Return To The Hundred Acre Wood. There is also an audio read-along download available, narrated by Jim Broadbent (www.disney.co.uk).

** Read more on books and culture

Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

Latest