So They Call You Pisher!: A Memoir

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Michael Wayne Rosen (born 7 May 1946) is a British children's author, poet, presenter, political columnist, broadcaster and activist who has written 140 books. He served as Children's Laureate from 2007 to 2009. He won the 2023 PEN Pinter Prize, awarded by English PEN, for his "fearless" body of work. [1] Early life [ edit ] Rosen’s poems for children always see the world from their perspective and can be counted on to induce giggles – “‘Don’t throw fruit at a computer’ / ‘You what?’” – especially when performed by the poet himself: he doesn’t have 98m YouTube views for nothing. He is learning to adapt to virtual school visits, “a kind of informal telly”, zooming into the camera with one eye: “then my dad came in and said ...” He has written more than 200 books and counting, including greedily devoured favourites Chocolate Cake, Fluff the Farting Fish and Monster. His most recent books for adults include The Missing, an investigation into the fates of his European Jewish relatives during the second world war, and his 2017 memoir So They Call You Pisher!, a lively account of growing up the son of Jewish communists in postwar Pinner: “Not the most encouraging place to start a branch of a political organisation aimed at world revolution.” Then there are the two books he wrote in response to the death of his second son Eddie (he has five children, including Eddie, and two stepchildren) from meningitis when he was 18 just over 20 years ago: Carrying the Elephant, a mixture of prose and poetry, and Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, illustrated by Blake. “I loved him very, very much,” Rosen writes, “but he died anyway.” Rosen likes to say he is ‘recovering’ rather than ‘recovered’. Covid has left him with a hearing aid in one ear, dizziness and breathlessness Rosen was appointed the sixth British Children's Laureate in June 2007, succeeding Jacqueline Wilson, and held the honour until June 2009, when he was succeeded by Anthony Browne. Rosen signed off from the Laureateship with an article in The Guardian, in which he said, "Sometimes when I sit with children when they have the space to talk and write about things, I have the feeling that I am privileged to be the kind of person who is asked to be part of it". In 2007, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Exeter.

Rosen, 76, is talking over video call from his study at his home in north London, where he sits behind a desk piled high with books. It is a month since he published Getting Better, a new memoir in which he reflects on some of the lowest periods of his life, Covid included. UWE Bristol: News". Info.uwe.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 30 January 2013 . Retrieved 27 November 2012. There is no fix, but he details the slow process of finding a voice that allows him to talk about Eddie, aided by a child asking him a question about his son at a talk. He subsequently wrote about the experience in Sad Book (2004), illustrated by Quentin Blake. More than 20 years on, he finds that Eddie is “there, he’s in me, he’s around me … Is he ‘at rest’ in me and with me? Yes, I think it’s something like that.” Rosen is the author of 140 books of poetry and prose, and is our former Children’s Laureate. He is tall and lanky; when he sits down at his desk it is like watching a long piece of paper fold itself into creases. It’s more than two years since he left hospital after a near-lethal battle with Covid. And though while in hospital nurses shaved his jaw clean, now his beard has returned and so has his good humour, so that he more closely resembles the Rosen people know: scruffy, daffy, softly playful. Rosen, Michael (2016). "These are the Hands by Michael Rosen". Scottish Poetry Library. Archived from the original on 25 September 2021 . Retrieved 21 November 2021.In April 2010, Rosen was given the Fred and Anne Jarvis Award from the National Union of Teachers for "campaigning for education". In July 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Nottingham Trent University. Bearn, Emily (16 November 2008), "A novel approach to the classroom", The Sunday Times, archived from the original on 20 May 2013 , retrieved 25 November 2008 He is also a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, a charity that enables schoolchildren across the UK to perform Shakespeare in professional theatres. [27] Rosen’s first children’s book, Mind Your Own Business (1974), was a collection of poems. It included drawings by Quentin Blake, who also illustrated Roald Dahl’s books. Some of his other poetry collections are You Wait Till I’m Older Than You (1996) and Bananas in My Ears (2011). Many of his poems are about his life between the ages of 2 and 12.

Richmond, John (4 August 2008). "Harold Rosen [obituary]". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 24 April 2017 . Retrieved 12 December 2016. If anyone understands suffering, it is Rosen. In Getting Better, he documents the hardships he has faced, from Covid to the legacy of the Holocaust on his family (his two great-uncles were murdered in Auschwitz) to the premature deaths of his mother and his son, Eddie. It feels significant that, after decades spent telling mostly fictional stories for children, this is his second memoir in three years; the last one, 2021’s Many Different Kinds of Love, gave an account of Covid through the patient’s eyes, chronicling the days leading up to his hospitalisation, and latterly, his rehabilitation. Busby, Mattha (6 June 2020). "Michael Rosen takes first steps as he recovers from Covid-19". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 6 June 2020 . Retrieved 6 June 2020. After the dreams, Rosen feels sadness for a few minutes, but then there are cats to feed and schoolchildren to read to and tweets to conjure and books to write. “I’m a great believer in these small practical tasks,” he says. “The fact that you would go to a shop and buy some loo roll and come home, I get immense satisfaction from these things. They’re about getting on, achieving things. It’s completely absurd, isn’t it? It’s completely trivial.” Time is not a healer, in Rosen’s mind, but doing things is. “Think of all the things I’ve done between 1999 and now,” he says. “Well, to a certain extent they displace some of the grief, though you can’t escape it.” He adds, “For people who lose somebody, with very long days to get through and very little to do, I think that’s difficult. They talk about the talking cure. Well, there is a sort of doing cure, too.” ‘I knew my son had gone’: Michael Rosen on the moment that changed his life – extract

Exploring the roles that trauma and grief have played in his own life, Rosen looks at the road to recovery, asking how we can find it within ourselves to live well again after – even during – the darkest times. The fact that this is a personal story means that it provides a relatable pathway into the overwhelming event of the Holocaust for young readers (and for adults, too). It's important that children and adults understand and empathise with the real people and their stories underneath the sometimes incomprehensible numbers and scale that history presents us when talking about the Holocaust. In March 2021, Rosen released the book Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death and the NHS, an account of his experience being hospitalised with COVID-19 a year earlier, [30] including his own poem for the 60th anniversary of the NHS, "These are the Hands", [31] being pinned to his bed or wall.

I notice on Rosen’s desk an unframed photograph of a young man. Rosen swivels to look. “That’s him,” he says, “not all that long before he died.” A Materialist and Intertextual Examination of the Process of Writing a Work of Children's Literature" (PDF). University of North London. October 1997. Archived (PDF) from the original on 6 September 2021. An old friend asked him if he sees the world differently now. “The answer is yes, but I’m not quite sure how.” The most profound change is an increased sense of vulnerability; as he describes it in one of the collection’s earliest poems, he has gone from being “a certain person” to an awareness that “Now everything’s not certain”. It’s bewildering,” Rosen says, when I ask about his parents’ response. “It’s in the book, really, because I’m looking at how they coped with that trauma.” Rosen grew up in a flat in Pinner, northwest London; both of his parents were teachers. He describes his mother as “in many ways extraordinary”. Of her refusal to discuss Alan, he says, “It’s incredibly gutsy, but at the same time quite worrying that she thought she couldn’t, or shouldn’t, mention it.” Rosen never quizzed his mother on the issue; she died at 56. “She wasn’t a hard woman. She was the soft one, hardly ever got angry with us, whereas the old man sometimes lost his rag. But there must have been some inner grit to make that decision. We would now think that it’s not a great idea – the general consensus seems to be, ‘OK, you don’t have to let it all hang out, but you can say it, you can talk about it.” Rosen's mother, Connie (née Isakofsky; 1920–1976), worked as a secretary at the Daily Worker and later as a primary school teacher and training college lecturer. She had attended Central Foundation Girls' School, where she made friends such as Bertha Sokoloff. She met Harold in 1935, when both were aged 15, as they were both members of the Young Communist League. They participated in the Battle of Cable Street together. As a young couple, they settled in Pinner, Middlesex. They left the Communist Party in 1957. Rosen never joined, but his parents' activities influenced his childhood. For example, their acquaintance with the bohemian literary figure Beatrice Hastings made an impression on him as a child. [5] [8]

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Rosen has been married three times, is the father of five children, and has two stepchildren. Eddie (1980–1999), his second son, died at the age of 18 from meningitis, and his death was the inspiration for Michael Rosen's Sad Book published in 2004. Rosen lives in North London with his third wife, Emma-Louise Williams, and their two children.

Glynn, Paul (28 June 2023). "Michael Rosen 'honoured' to win PEN Pinter Prize". BBC News . Retrieved 2 July 2023. Galton, Bridget (30 June 2023). "Muswell Hill poet Michael Rosen wins PEN Pinter prize". Times Series.In 1969, Rosen graduated from Wadham College, Oxford, and became a graduate trainee at the BBC. Among the work that he did while there in the 1970s was presenting a series on BBC Schools television called Walrus (write and learn, read, understand, speak). He was also scriptwriter on the children's reading series Sam on Boffs' Island, but Rosen found working for the corporation frustrating: "Their view of 'educational' was narrow. The machine had decided this was the direction to take. Your own creativity was down the spout." Sandhu, Sukhdev (23 September 2017). "So They Call You Pisher! by Michael Rosen review – Communism, Clive James and attitude". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 17 April 2023 . Retrieved 17 April 2023.