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Michael Morpurgo was appointed Children’s Laureate in May 2003 and held the post until May 2005. He was awarded an OBE for services to Literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2007. He has written over 100 books, including Why the Whales Came, which was made into a major feature film, and My Friend Walter, filmed by Thames Television. Kensuke’s Kingdom won the Children’s Book Award 2000 and was also shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book Award and the Carnegie Medal in 2000. He received critical acclaim for his book Out of the Ashes, a moving novel about the foot and mouth crisis that was adapted for television. His novel, Private Peaceful, a harrowing story about the First World War was published in Autumn 2003. It won the 2004 Red House Children’s Book Award and the Blue Peter Book Award in 2005. His latest novel is Kaspar: Prince of Cats was inspired during his time as Writer in Residence at the Savoy Hotel in London. Recently, his novel War Horse has been adapted into a play that performed to critical acclaim at the National Theatre in 2007 and is returning to the National in 2008.

 

During his time as Children’s Laureate, Michael travelled all over the UK talking to children and telling his stories and encouraging them to tell theirs. 

 

In 1976, Michael and his wife, Clare, started the charity Farms for City Children. They help to run three farms around the country, in Gloucestershire, Pembrokeshire and North Devon. Each farm offers children and teachers from urban primary schools the chance to live and work in the countryside for a week, and gain hands-on experience. For more information about the work of Farms for City Children, please visit Archive Itemswww.farmsforcitychildren.co.uk

 

Michael Morpurgo lives in Devon with his wife Clare. He has three children and seven grandchildren.

Michael Morpurgo’s  website is at: www.michaelmorpurgo.org

 

The reason writers write are various and personal. For me it has always seemed natural and right to concentrate on those subjects that move me in some way or other, to laughter or to tears, subjects that I care about deeply, so that when I am writing the stories seem to emerge from me because I have a real need to write them.   

 

So why war?  It’s personal.   I was born in 1943 my first eye view of this world was of a place ravaged by war.   I played in the ruins of bombed-out houses, my school playground looked out over a bomb site.  I met people physically scarred by war, and many more whose lives had been forever damaged by it.   I saw the pain people felt and the grief they had to endure.

 

For better or for worse I am quite an autographical writer.   It’s my memory I rely on as the spur to the imaginative process of story making, and my memories of childhood are the most vivid memories I have, not unusual I think.  

 

 

I write about war to understand it better, its effect on those who fight in it, and die in it, and on those who are left behind afterwards to pick up the pieces.   War does seem to endemic to the human condition.   However much we might long for peace, it seems we always find a good reason to fight the next war.

 

For children of today in this country, who live far removed from the effects of war, fighting is part of their entertainment world.   They see depictions of war on their televisions and DVDs, in their videogames all the time.   They also so see it on news programmes, the real thing, the real bombs, real destruction, real death and suffering.  That there is a confusion here for them I have no doubt.   Maybe fiction, sensitively written can engage them more deeply, can move them, can move them to a deeper empathy of the universal suffering that war brings to all of us.

 

Copyright Michael Morpurgo 2008