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Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen was born into a London Jewish family, the son of two distinguished educators - Connie and Harold Rosen. Michael's childhood was rich in books, stories and conversation; on one camping holiday, Harold Rosen memorably read his family the unabridged version of Little Dorrit. Michael's childhood ambitions were to be an actor (a desire fuelled by weekly visits to the Questors Theatre in Ealing) or a farmer. He has strong memories about the way he was taught poetry at school - "There was a ritual about it... almost semi-religious... some people were made to feel a failure because they couldn't learn it."

Michael attended Middlesex Hospital Medical School for a year but transferred to Wadham College, Oxford to study English Literature. At Oxford, he started to realise his ambition of acting (as well as writing and directing). Michael still says that if he wasn't a poet, he'd like to be an actor. Anyone who has seen him in performance knows that he already is!

The narrowness of his course of study proved a source of dissatisfaction and Michael began looking outside his recommended reading to contemporary working, class ballads. He retains a passion for street rhymes, popular songs and folk stories.

Michael's first play, Backbone, was performed at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1969. His next stop was the BBC, where he worked on Play School, schools TV and radio drama. In 1973, Michael joined the National Film School and encountered "the freakiest people I've ever met."

Michael Rosen has been writing poetry since the age of 18. His first collection, Mind Your Own Business, was published in 1974. Although it was not planned as a collection for children, it appeared on Andre Deutsch's children's list. This, says Michael, was a turning point - "Suddenly it all fused: the writing, the performing, the popular audience. It was just incredibly exhilarating."

He quickly made a name for himself with his collections of humorous verse for children, including Wouldn't You Like to Know, You Tell Me and Quick, Let's Get Out of Here. Poetry critic Morag Styles has no hesitation in identifying Rosen as "one of the most significant figures in contemporary children's poetry." He was, says Styles, one of the first poets "to draw closely on his own childhood experiences... and to 'tell it as it was' in the ordinary language children actually use."

Michael was fundamental in opening up children's access to poetry: both through his own writing and with important anthologies such as Culture Shock. He was one of the first poets to make visits to schools throughout the UK (and further afield in Australia, Canada and Singapore). In 1993, Michael gained an MA in Children's Literature from Reading University.

He has also had a very distinguished broadcasting career, presenting such programmes as BBC Radio 4's Treasure Islands, BBC Radio 3's Best Words and Meridian - the World Service Arts programme.

PLACE AND DATE OF BIRTH:
Harrow, Middlesex, 07/05/46

FAVOURITE BOOK:
Carl Sandburg: Complete Poems

MOST TREASURED POSSESSION:
A book I had as a child called The Merry Pranks of Till Eulenspiegel

FAVOURITE SONG:
Bob Marley: Three Little Birds

FAVOURITE FILM:
Pelle The Conqueror

When did you start writing?
I think that the first time I started writing outside of school was when I was about 16. I wanted to write poems like D.H. Lawrence's poems.

Where do you get your ideas and inspiration from?
I think most writers write out of a mixture of remembering, observing and imagining. What happens with me is quite often I start with a memory, mix it with observations of people I know and then mix in a bit of 'What if ...?'

Can you give your top three tips to becoming a successful author?
1. Write! - don't say to yourself 'I might' or 'I could'. Instead - just do it.

2. Copy up whatever you write into something that can easily be read to anyone. Typed/word-processed or hand-written very clearly.

3. Show what you write to people you respect. Listen to what they say.

Favourite memory?
From childhood - sharing my bedroom with my brother and having jokes and fun at the weekends, doing imitations of people we knew.

Favourite place in the world and why?
Broadcasting House in London because it has become the place where, apart from my home, some of the nicest things I've done or have happened to me, have taken place.

What are your hobbies?
Watching football - especially Arsenal. I like the way football is full of surprises, scares, drama.

Collecting books - I like the way a book is like a storehouse of ideas.

If you hadn't been a writer, what do you think you would have been?

Probably a teacher. My parents were teachers and for a time it looked like it was the only thing I could do.

I was born and brought up in the suburbs of north-west London. It was a strange place for us to be, really, and I often think that my parents, my father especially, were in a way stranded there. They had come from the East End, and whose parents or grandparents had fled from the anti-Jewish pogroms of eastern Europe. Their friends and soulmates seemed to live elsewhere so that as my brother and I established our friendships through school, I felt as if I led two lives, the one suburban, the other more radical and bohemian.

I went through school and university fairly successfully, with a peculiar zig-zag that took in a couple of years of studying medicine. Then I took up a traineeship at the BBC which was terminated fairly abruptly on account of a minor witch-hunt of BBC employees in the early 1970s. Since that time, I've done a mixture of writing, performing, teaching, lecturing, appearing on radio and TV programmes and helping bring up my own and other people's children.

The three books, Carrying the Elephant, This Is Not My Nose and In The Colonie are intended to be peculiar autobiographies. Using key moments, the death of my son, a ten year bout of hypothyroidism and a stay in a French Colonie de Vacances respectively, as metaphors, I've tried to present three fragmented, themed looks at my life. The first tries to deal with loss, the second with the hiding and revealing of reality, the third with questioning where I (and we?) belong.

For the last thirty years I've been writing and editing children's books, including We're Going On a Bear Hunt, Quick Let's Get Out Of Here and the Sad Book. In the last fifteen years or so I've spent a good deal of time working for radio, as a presenter of programmes about books, poetry and language.

It's an interesting and peculiar life. I see it as a kind of patchwork, made up of quite distinct and different squares, contiguous but not overlapping. When I go to bed at night, quite often I have no idea what I'm doing the following day until I look at my diary and it could be anything from working on a radio script, writing a children's book, doing my one-man show in a school, teaching at a university, writing a prose-poem or just playing about with one or some of my children.