The Borrowers is a children's fantasy novel by Mary Norton about tiny people who "borrow" things from normal humans and keep their existence unknown. The central characters are the Clock family: father Pod, mother Homily and their spirited thirteen year-old daughter, Arrietty. Published in 1952, it won the Carnegie Medal for that year, and was selected in 2007 by judges of the CILIP Carnegie Medal for children's literature as one of the ten most important children's novels of the past 70 years.