THE STYLE & TECHNIQUE OF michael morpurgo
Tony Rossiter looks at ‘a national treasure of a children’s author’
Tony Rossiter
‘The most solid, classical of children’s authors,’ is how Anthony Horowitz has described him, with ‘books… [that] have a strong social conscience and an honesty that makes them universal.’ One of our best-loved children’s authors, Michael Morpurgo has written more than 130 books. I’ll concentrate in this article on just three of them.
Beginnings
As a four-year-old he loved listening to his mother reading to him. He believes that the stories and poems she read then she sowed the seed that gave him a love for the music of words. But unlike most well-known writers, he did not enjoy either reading or writing when he was a child. Any love of reading was wiped out when he went to prep school, where pupils, forced to stand up to read, were ‘taught by fear’. His stepfather gave him a copy of Oliver Twist, but he preferred to read comics and the books of Enid Blyton. The first book he read and enjoyed was Treasure Island. Interest in literature was reawakened at university:
‘I remember at King’s College my old professor sitting on a desk in a dusty room and reading us Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He read it as if he loved it. And a little echo came into my head because the last person who had read to me like that was mother.’
After leaving school Michael Morpurgo went to Sandhurst, but soon decided that the Army was not for him. Instead, he studied English and French at King’s College London.
His first job was teaching at a primary school in Kent, and he remained a teacher for eight years. Every day he had to read the children a story. He soon realised that they were bored by the book he was reading, and started to tell his own stories. These sparked their interest, and he could see that there was magic in it for them; he realised there was magic in it for him too. So he began not as a writer, but as an oral storyteller. He progressed from storyteller to writer with his first book, It Never Rained: Five Stories, published in 1974. He later said that ‘I was lucky. I happened to write some short stories that a publisher was looking for at that moment.’