Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Borrowers won the Carnegie Medal in 1952, the year it was published by Dent in London. The award recognized it as the outstanding children's book by a British author that year. In 2007, on the 70th anniversary of the medal, it was named one of the top ten Medal-winning works of all time.
The Borrowers was written by the English author Mary Norton and published by Dent in 1952. Harcourt, Brace and Company published the American edition in 1953 with illustrations by Beth and Joe Krush. Woman's Day magazine also serialized it that summer across four installments, with illustrations by Erik Blegvad.
Arrietty Clock is the fourteen-year-old daughter of Pod and Homily Clock, a family of tiny people who live hidden beneath a grandfather clock in an old English house. She owns a collection of pocket-sized books and is the only Borrower in the novel educated enough to understand that the Borrowers as a people may be dying out. She befriends a human boy who brings her books in exchange for her reading aloud to him.
Borrower families take their surnames from the part of the house they inhabit or once inhabited. The Clock family lives beneath a grandfather clock, the Rain-Pipes lived in a drainpipe, and the Harpsichords settled in the wainscot of a drawing room where a harpsichord once stood. The naming system maps an entire hidden social hierarchy onto the architecture of a single house.
A. N. Wilson read The Borrowers as an allegory of post-war Britain, finding in its picture of a diminished people living in an old, half-empty, decaying house a portrait of a contracting empire. On this reading, the Borrowers survive by taking what a larger world no longer notices it is missing.
Six screen adaptations have been made: a television film in 1973, a two-part television series in 1992 and 1993 titled The Borrowers and The Return of the Borrowers, a feature film in 1997, the animated film Arrietty in 2010, a television film in 2011, and an animated series launched in 2025.