Michael Rosen wins this year’s PEN Pinter Prize: A glimpse into the work of the children’s writer

Who is Michael Rosen?

Rosen was the sixth British Children’s Laureate between 2007 and 2009 and is known for making poetry accessible to children through his work and performances. His themes are often social, political and ethical. In On the Move: Poems about Migration (2020), for instance, a book of poems divided into four segments, Rosen explores contemporary and historical migrations through his family’s personal experience and from a global perspective on the ongoing migration drive across Europe.

He is among the first poets who visited schools extensively across the UK and even overseas, talking about poetry and literature and the ways it can help us see the world around us with humour and empathy. “Michael Rosen has a rare, invaluable gift: the ability to address the most serious matters of life in a spirit of joy, humour and hope. Fearless in holding power to account, his work is nevertheless a lesson in humanity, and how in times of vulnerability we may discover the best version of ourselves,” said Amber Massie-Blomfield, another jury member of this year’s PEN Pinter prize.

Born to an educationalist father and a teacher mother, Rosen grew up around books. His parents’ activism and their eclectic circle of friends that included literary figures such as the critic Wayne Clayson Booth and poet and theosophist Beatrice Hastings (pen name of Emily Alice Haigh) had a profound influence on him. Rosen knew early on that he wanted to write — his first attempt at writing satirical poems about people he knew came when he was merely 12.

Afterwards, a year at Middlesex Hospital Medical School later, he moved to Wadham College in Oxford to study English. It was there that he realised that he also had a flair for acting. It would be the stepping stone towards a career in performance poetry. After starting off his career as a playwright with the play Backbone, Rosen worked at the BBC for a while till his left-leaning socialist views led him to go freelance in 1972.

Rosen’s first book of children’s poems, Mind Your Own Business, came out in 1974. At present, he is a professor of children’s literature at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Rosen’s most well-known works

Some of Rosen’s most well-known books include You Can’t Catch Me (1982), which won the Signal Poetry Award; You Wait Till I Am Older Than You (1996), Rover (2007), Fantastic Mr Dahl (2012, on Roald Dahl’s writing life). His picture book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (1989), illustrated by Helen Oxenbury is a classic tale of overcoming obstacles, that has sold over nine million copies world-wide and won several awards, including the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize.

Rosen’s Sad Book, illustrated by Quentin Blake, was published in 2004. The book speaks of living with loss and bereavement and has been critically acclaimed for its sensitive portrayal of a father grieving for his dead son. It followed his 2002 work, Carrying the Elephant: A Memoir of Love and Loss, that also spoke of the death of his teenaged son Eddie from meningitis in 1999 in prose-poems.

Rosen has also written for adults. Among his books for adults are Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables and Allegories from Great Britain (2018), Mr Mensh (2019) and his 2021 Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death and the NHS, an account of his life-altering experience of being in an induced coma for six weeks after contracting COVID-19 at the start of the pandemic, being on the brink of death and making it back.

The PEN Pinter Prize

Rosen will receive the award on October 11 alongside another ‘Writer of Courage’, whose work upholds freedom of expression, often at great personal risk, and who will be chosen by Rosen from “a shortlist of international cases supported by English PEN”. Established in 2009, previous winners of the PEN Pinter Prize include Hanif Kureishi (2010), Salman Rushdie (2014), Lemn Sissay (2019). Writer Malorie Blackman won it last year.