Michael Morpurgo

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2004

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the widely respected children's author and the current Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo. He styles himself as a 'story-teller/writer' and the themes he explores are the relationships between young and old, children and animals and children's experiences of loneliness and self-reliance. He was initially planning on a career in the military and trained at Sandhurst, but a change of direction led him to study English at university and become a teacher and then, when he was aware his class were bored with a book he was reading to them, started telling them his own stories.

Together with his wife, Clare, he set up the charity Farms for City Children in Devon to give inner-city children the opportunity to experience life on a farm, working with animals and being close to nature. The charity now has three farms and they have been visited by more than 30,000 children. He is the third Children's Laureate and says he is devoted to giving children a love of books and reading. His own works include War Horse, Kensuke's Kingdom, Why the Wales Came and, most recently, Private Peaceful.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My Godway this week is a writer. Over the past 30 years in more than 90 books,
0:34.6	he's spread out for his audience of children
0:36.8	a world which is both real and exciting,
0:39.4	and one where he hopes they'll learn to love literature. He's won innumerable prizes for his work but that's not what drives him these days
0:46.4	as much as the belief that our educational system is inadequate when it comes to words and
0:51.2	stories. His style is eloquent and simple and his themes,
0:55.9	relationships between young and old, children and animals, loneliness,
0:59.9	prejudice, expertly engage the interest of young readers.
1:04.0	I've grown up, he says, from just a pure storyteller to a storyteller writer, and that's
1:10.0	where I think I am now.
1:11.8	He is the children's laureate Michael Morpergo. How do you define the difference
1:16.2	then Michael between the two, the storyteller and the storyteller writer?
1:20.0	A question of style?
1:21.0	Style and I think I began orally.
1:24.0	I mean I began telling children in my class when I was teaching,
1:27.0	would tell them stories, and telling is different from writing.
1:30.0	I didn't know it at the time.
1:31.0	I thought you could just write down the words, but the one thing leads to the other, and the more practice you become at it,
1:36.7	do you find your voice as a writer rather than your voice as a storyteller? But they're linked.
1:41.5	But don't you, I mean you use more words as a storyteller when they're linked but don't you I mean you use more words as a
	...

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