Meet the author michael morpurgo biography
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Michael Morpurgo
Michael Morpurgo has written over 100 books. He is a three-time winner of the Prix Sorcière in France and has twice won the Red House Children's Book Award in England. In addition, has won the Whitbread Award, the Smarties Prize, and has been short-listed for the Carnegie Medal. He has also been named the 2003-2005 Children's Laureate, an award he helped to establish with the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes to reward a lifetime contribution to children's literature and highlight the importance of the role of children's books. He was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2006 for services to literature.
He has had a lifetime of involvement with children, as a teacher, as a father and grandfather and as the founder with his wife of "Farms for City Children," a charity that enables city kids to come and share his passionate love for the countryside in general and animals in particular.
Books bygd Michael Morpurgo
War Horse
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I was born a really long time ago. 5th October 1943. In St Alban’s in Hertfordshire. My mother was there too, strangely enough, but my father was away at the war, in Baghdad. I had one older brother, Pieter. We both were evacuated to Northumberland when we were little, away from the bombs. After the war it was all change at home, not that I remember much of it. My mother wanted to be with a man she had met while my father was away in the army. He was called Jack Morpurgo. So my father came home to find there was no place for him. There was a divorce. Jack Morpurgo married my mother, and so became our stepfather. We lived in London then. We went to primary school at St Matthias in the Warwick Road, then were sent off to boarding school in Sussex – the Abbey, Ashhurst Wood. I was there for six years, hated being away from home, loved rugby and singing. Then I went off to a school in Canterbury, The King’s School, where I got more used to being away from home and still loved rugby and
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Michael Morpurgo
About Author
Multi-award winning author, Michael Morpurgo, is one of Britain's best-loved writers for children. This picture shows him signing books for children at the Party at the Palace in the summer, 2006.
Michael was born in 1943 and attended schools in London, Sussex and Canterbury. He studied English and French at London University and then took up a career in teaching, first at a primary school in Kent. That was when he started telling stories to children and then began writing them down.
In 1976 Michael and his wife, Clare, started the charity Farms For City Children (FFCC), which gives young children from inner city and urban areas a week on a farm, where they work actively and purposefully. There are now three farms Nethercott in Devon, Treginnis in Wales and Wick in Gloucestershire - and Michael divides his time between working with the children on the farm and writing.
During his writing career, Michael has won many prizes, including the Smarties P