Barbara Sleigh was born in Birmingham, the daughter of the artist Bernard Sleigh and his wife Stella, née Phillp, who had married in 1901. Both came from a Methodist background, but she was brought up an Anglican. The family moved to Chesham for a time, then back to Birmingham. The marriage broke up in about 1914. Her older brother, Brocas Linwood Sleigh (1902-1965), was also a writer.
Having attended art college and teacher's training college, Sleigh taught in various schools before joining the teacher training department at Goldsmith's College in London in 1929. She went to work for the BBC programme Children's Hour in 1932. There in 1935 she married a colleague, David Davis (1908-1996) at Dunchurch, Warwickshire, but BBC house rules at the time would not allow husbands and wives to work in the same department. She resigned and turned to freelance writing, film criticism and broadcasting. She and Davis had one son and two daughters.
Sleigh's best known novels for children are the three in the Carbonel series (1955-1978), about a king of cats. The Carbonel books are still in print..
The other writings by Sleigh include Jessamy, a 1967 time-slip novel, some collections of stories, radio adaptations, picture books for younger children, and educational readers. Several of her books appeared in Puffin, the Penguin imprint, and she wrote an article in 1967 for the first edition of the house magazine Puffin Post. Sleigh was included in Uncle Mac's Children's Hour Book (Purnell, undated, c. 1950), in the 1974 children's anthology of stories and poems Happy Families, edited by Barbara Willard, and in the Puffin Annual (1974), edited by Kaye Webb and others. Her final work was as the editor of an anthology of stories about witches: Broomsticks and Beasticles (1981).
