The author of children's classic Stig of the Dump, Clive King, has died at the age of  94. King was born in Richmond upon Thames, south-west London, the son of Sir Geoffrey King, a lawyer and civil servant who worked in the Treasury, where he was responsible for writing the law behind national insurance payments, and May Tuke, who grew up in Chiswick House, where her father ran a “lunatic asylum” for the well-to-do. After King’s school in Rochester, Kent, King went to Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied English.

King’s classic Stig of the Dump has never been out of print and has sold more than 2 million copies since it was published in 1963. King's book, Hamid of Aleppo, was published in 1958. Other books included The Twenty-Two Letters, The Town that Went South and Snakes and Snakes. He died in Norfolk and is survived by his widow Penny and three children. Stig of the Dump is about a boy who discovers a cave-boy living at the bottom of a chalk pit, captured children's imaginations from the moment it was published. It drew on Clive King's own adventures growing up with his three brothers in Kent. It has been adapted for TV three times, in 1981 and in 2002 and 2013. His publishers Penguin have paid tribute to the author.

Published in 1963, like many other successes Stig of the Dump was turned down by a succession of publishers before Kaye Webb, then creating the Puffin list, bought it and published it handsomely in a paperback edition with illustrations and a now iconic cover by Edward Ardizzone. Fifty years after the book’s publication, King opined that Stig was rejected by publishers because, even then, adults were anxious about children acting so entirely alone.

Despite that, because it is a story that is both delightful and strong, and maybe because it is possible to think that Stig and his adventures with Barney are imagined rather than real, the book has endured and flourished in the intervening 55 years. Having been in print continuously with more than two million copies sold, it is on every list of modern classic children’s books, is a staple of primary school classrooms, was selected as the representative title for the 60s in Puffin’s list of The Puffins of Puffins, and has been adapted twice for TV.

Tributes are pouring in through social media as Barney and friends are every child’s childhood friends. And has won the hearts of many of its readers.