Michael Rosen is a poet and the author of many books for children, including the international bestseller We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, which won the Nestlé Smarties Children’s Book Prize; A Great Big Cuddle, illustrated by Chris Riddell; and Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, illustrated by Quentin Blake. He received the Eleanor Farjeon Award for services to children’s literature in 1997 and served as Children’s Laureate in the UK between 2007 and 2009. Michael Rosen lives in London.
Helen Oxenbury is a two-time winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal and the 2015 Carle Artist Honoree. She is a celebrated illustrator of many well-loved books, including Charley’s First Night and When Charley Met Grampa, both by Amy Hest, Farmer Duck by Martin Waddell, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen, and There’s Going to Be a Baby by her husband, John Burningham. Helen Oxenbury lives in London.
If he wasn’t already a poet, storyteller, BBC broadcaster, and prolific children’s book author, Michael Rosen says he would like to be an actor. Anyone who has seen him in performance knows that he already is—whether bringing his humorous verse to life in front of a classroom or presenting an internationally broadcast radio show.
The charismatic author was introduced to the pleasures of language at an early age by his parents, both of them distinguished educators in London. When he was a teenager, his mother produced a British radio program that featured poetry, and this inspired him to start writing his own. Now a highly popular children’s poet and author, Michael Rosen is known for “telling it like it is” in the ordinary language that children actually use. In Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, he explores the experience of sadness in a way that resonates with all readers, with unmitigated truth and a touch of humor. About this book, which came from the author’s real and very personal grief, Kirkus Reviews raves in a starred review, “Readers . . . will be touched by the honesty and perception here.” In the picture book This Is Our House, Michael Rosen captured the ways that children use the language of discrimination. “Our attitudes about who’s okay and who’s not okay get formed when we’re very young,” says the author, whose simple, lighthearted story makes a compelling case for tolerance.
Michael Rosen spends an enormous amount of time in schools, working with children. When putting together Classic Poetry: An Illustrated Collection, he selected poems he knew firsthand that children would appreciate, together with biographical sketches of the poets themselves. “There are so many ways to enjoy poems,” the author says. “This book is a way of offering new insights into poems, poets, and the relationship between them . . . to show that great poems have been written by real people who lived in their own time and place.”
The idea that great writing comes from real people who are influenced by a certain time and place is key to the appeal of Shakespeare: His Work and His World, a delightful, engaging look at a literary icon that asks, “What’s so special about Shakespeare?” For his rich insight on the topic, Michael Rosen can again thank his parents. “When I was a kid, I was often taken to see Shakespeare’s plays, and my parents helped me get hold of what was special about Shakespeare,” he says. “I’ve written this book in hopes that I can do something along the lines of what my parents did for me.” In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, an elegantly illustrated volume, Michael Rosen retells one of the best-loved plays of all time scene by scene in a simple, lively style that appeals both to aficionados of Shakespeare’s play and to readers discovering it for the first time.
Michael Rosen received the annual JM Barrie Lifetime Achievement Award from Action for Children's Arts in 2021 for his work championing the arts for children, and was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Nursing in recognition of his lived experience and his efforts to increase public awareness about COVID-19. In 2023, he was the winner of the PEN Pinter Prize.
In addition to his writing career, Michael Rosen works as a professor of children's literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. He lives in London.
Growing up in Ipswich, England, Helen Oxenbury loved nothing more than drawing. As a teenager, she entered art school and basked in the pleasure of drawing, and nothing but drawing, all day. During vacations she helped out at the Ipswich Repertory Theatre workshop, mixing paints for set designers. It was there that she decided her future lay in theater design.
While studying costume design, however, Helen Oxenbury was told by a teacher, “This is hopeless, you know. You ought to go and do illustrations—you’re much more interested in the character, and we don’t know who’s going to play the part!”
But sets and scenery, not books, remained Helen Oxenbury’s preoccupation for several more years as she embarked on careers in theater, film, and TV. After marrying John Burningham, oneof the world’s most eminent children’s book illustrators, and giving birth to their first child, at last she turned to illustrating children’s books. “When I had babies,” Helen Oxenbury says, “I wanted to be home with them and look for something to do there.”
Today, Helen Oxenbury is among the most popular and critically acclaimed illustrators of her time. She is a two-time Greenaway Medal winner, and her numerous books for children include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its companion, Alice Through the Looking Glass, both by Lewis Carroll; Martin Waddell’s Farmer Duck, which won the Nestlé Smarties Children’s Book Prize; So Much! by Trish Cooke; as well as her own classic board books for babies. She collaborated with author Phyllis Root on the jubilant, no-nonsense tall tale Big Momma Makes The World. “As I read Phyllis’s text, I imagined Big Momma as part Buddha, part housewife,” she says. “It was intimidating to create a whole world, but very enjoyable.”
And what does she love most about her work? Thinking up new ideas? Seeing the finished book? Not at all. For Helen, “The best part is when I think I know what I’m doing and I’ve completed a few drawings. In fact, when I get about a third of the way through, and I feel I’m on my way, then I’m happy. It’s like reading a good book—you don’t want it to end.”
Helen Oxenbury lives in London and works in a nearby studio. She is also an avid tennis player.
