The Hundred Acre Wood is already home to a diverse animal population, from a kangaroo to the world’s most famous bear. Now a penguin is due to join the cast dreamed up by AA Milne in 1926, to mark the 90th anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Author Brian Sibley was inspired to create the character of Penguin by a little-known photograph of Milne with his son Christopher Robin Milne, in which Christopher is playing with a penguin toy alongside a teddy bear. The latter, which was renamed Winnie-the-Pooh after London Zoo’s Canadian black bear Winnie, was bought by Christopher’s mother Daphne Milne from the Harrods toy department, and was the inspiration for Milne’s best-loved stories set in the Hundred Acre Wood.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest AA Milne and Christopher Robin Milne, pictured playing with the penguin and Winnie-the-Pooh. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images

The penguin toy is also believed to have been bought from Harrods, as were the toys that inspired Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger. Sibley, who was asked to write a new Pooh story to mark this year’s anniversary, said that the photo of the author and his son with the penguin toy came to mind while he was “pondering what other toys Christopher Robin might have owned but which were never written about”.

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“The thought of Pooh encountering a penguin seemed no more outlandish than his meeting a kangaroo and a tiger in a Sussex wood, so I started thinking about what might have happened if, on a rather snowy day, Penguin had found his way to Pooh Corner,” said Sibley, one of four authors to have contributed a seasonal story to the official sequel, The Best Bear in All the World, which will come out on 6 October from Egmont.

The writer said that he had loved Winnie-the-Pooh since childhood, and that writing his own story was “wildly exciting”, but “also daunting”.

“Milne’s effortless writing, especially in the Pooh books, at first seems highly imitable – until, that is, you attempt the imitation,” he said. “The stories may be light on plot: small, child-sized incidents involving mishaps and misunderstandings and experiences with that constant feature of country life – the weather.

“But what makes … these tales so memorable is their ability to work on two different levels: the child listener to the story always understands what is happening just before Pooh and the others do; while the adult reading to the child engages by recognising that, under their fur and feathers, the characters are just like people we know among our family, friends and colleagues.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winnie-the-Pooh and friends, in an illustration from The Best Bear in All the World. Illustration: Mark Burgess/Egmont Publishing

Sibley’s story Winter: In Which Penguin Arrives in the Forest, illustrated by Mark Burgess, will be joined by stories from Paul Bright, Kate Saunders and Jeanne Willis when the sequel is published in October. Burgess said that he was aiming for the spirit of Milne’s illustrator EH Shepard, “rather than slavishly copying”, when illustrating the sequel, and that he especially enjoyed drawing Penguin. “With a new character I feel I’m not quite so much in Shepard’s shadow. I hope Penguin has some more adventures,” said the illustrator.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Squeak the penguin, from the Christmas edition of Harrods News, 1922. Photograph: Harrods Archive

The character of Pooh made his first appearance in a 1923 poem in Punch. He went on to play a role in Milne’s poem collection When We Were Very Young, published in 1924, before starring in 1926’s Winnie-the-Pooh, which was an immediate hit. Milne followed this up with 1927’s Now We Are Six, and 1928’s The House at Pooh Corner. The Best Bear in All the World follows David Benedictus’s previous authorised sequel, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, which was published in 2009.

Harrods archivist Sebastian Wormell said he believed the penguin toy in the picture could be “Squeak” from the cartoon strip Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, as shown in its 1922 catalogue. “In the early years of the 20th century, toy penguins soared in popularity as the exploits of Antarctic explorers such as Shackleton and Scott fascinated the public,” said Wormell. “It’s exciting to think a new Harrods toy could be joining Winnie-the-Pooh’s gang after all this time.”