This interview with Michael Morpurgo in Financial Times shows that Morpurgo (Britain's third Children's Laureate) was raised with books. He still reads a great deal of children's literature. He calls J.K Rowling's Harry Potter first but The His Dark Materials trilogy is not far behind...
The "great grey-green greasy Limpopo River" of Rudyard Kipling's imagination made a big impression on the young boy who was to become Britain's third Children's Laureate.
Michael Morpurgo's mother, an actor, read to him from an early age - poems by Walter de la Mare and John Masefield, and then, one happy day, from Kipling's Just So Stories.
"The first story I ever remember loving was 'The Elephant's Child'," Morpurgo recalls. We are comfortably installed in a pub in Iddesleigh, Devon, near the farm he shares with his wife, Clare. "I loved that story. You hear the words sing as you read."
But something happened when he went to school. Suddenly words became a chore - "this serious thing that you had to spell". Morpurgo's stepfather, J.E. Morpurgo, then director general of the National Book League, tried to foster in him a love of literature, presenting him with Oliver Twist when he was seven. But young Michael instead found refuge in illustrated classics. Later, back at his home, he retrieves a copy and we discover "The Gentle Katherine" from Taming of the Shrew bears an uncanny resemblance to Helena Bonham Carter.
These classics did not reawaken his passion for stories, however. "With one or two exceptions, I didn't recover my love of words until I was at university," he says.
One exception was a trip to the theatre to see Paul Scofield perform Hamlet. "I remember just sitting there completely agog at the sound of his voice. It set my hairs on end."
The other was Robert Louis Stevenson, in particular Kidnapped and Treasure Island. "Those boyish books, where there's hardly a girl about, were aspirational. I wanted to go sailing on the seven seas, I wanted to fight the pirates; he took me there.
"I didn't realise until quite a bit later why it's as powerful as it is. Of course it is because this man is a poet. He's one of my great heroes. He's the person I most want to be."
Poetry has been a strong influence on Morpurgo. He was a young teacher in Kent when he first read Poetry in the Making by the former Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes. It was the start of Morpurgo's own writing career. For pleasure, he still turns to short fiction: Jean Giono's The Man Who Planted Trees, or the poetry of Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney, Yeats, Dylan Thomas and Charles Causley.
War poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen - "whose words just make you ache" - have inspired him. His novel Private Peaceful, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, announced next month, tells of a boy sent to the Somme.
He reads a great deal of children's literature. "Two or three writers have suddenly broken into everyone's notion of what children's books are. One is Rowling, undoubtedly. But frankly Philip Pullman isn't far behind, and nor is Jacqueline Wilson."
Of course, Morpurgo is also an admirer of Hughes. The two were near neighbours, and they became friends, collaborating on a book, All Around the Year. It was over dinner one evening at the Hughes' house that the idea of a Children's Laureate was dreamed up.
"He [Hughes] used to fish on a stretch of river which runs through our farm. We got to know one another. We exchanged books when they came out, though I must say I handed mine over rather tentatively to start with.
He thought that part of the thing of being a poet was to encourage other people to write. It really was part of who he was."
WHAT'S ON THE SHELF
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico
"It's a novella about a girl and an old man living on a marsh in the east of England and how a snow goose lands and is wounded. It's the story of the relationship between the two and the snow goose, beautifully and tenderly told."
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
"This is one of those books that I loved until someone told me to read the whole of it. It's the Lilliput part that I respond to, but it does go on a bit."
Stare Back and Smile by Joanna Lumley
"It's a wonderful autobiography. She's intelligent beyond belief and really really interesting."
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
"Until you read this book what you have are impressions from the television - you see an educated man with a terrific intellect and a strong sense of justice. Now when I hear him speak I know what life there has been behind it."
An Angel at My Table by Janet Frame
"She writes with great beauty and a great complexity, all at the same time. It's one of the things that you long to be able to do, and she seems to have that ability in bucketloads." [© Financial Times, 7/1/04]
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