Eleanor Butler Cameron, a former Los Angeles librarian who captured a National Book Award for writing imaginative children’s books, has died at the age of 84.

Cameron, who won the award in 1974 for the book “The Court of the Stone Children,” died Friday.

Born Eleanor Butler in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Cameron did not turn to writing until she became a middle-aged housewife with two sons who begged for space stories with magic in them.

The result was a series of some 17 children’s books beginning in 1954 with “The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet.”