Correct Answer : Option (B) - Michael Rosen

British children’s writer and performance poet Michael Rosen, 77, has been awarded the prestigious PEN Pinter Prize 2023, given to a writer from the UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth whose work is committed to a fearless exposition of truth about contemporary life.

Chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick, said, “Michael Rosen is one of our most tenacious and fearless writers. He is one of our most significant contemporary poets writing for young people. In over 140 books, he has championed a way of writing for children which reflects their everyday worlds, using humour and wordplay to validate their imaginative ways of thinking and being, and which has informed his succinct interventions into the lifeless way that children are taught literacy in schools…”

Who is Michael Rosen?
Rosen was the sixth British Children’s Laureate between 2007 and 2009 and is known for making poetry accessible to children through his work and performances. His themes are often social, political and ethical. In On the Move: Poems about Migration (2020), for instance, a book of poems divided into four segments, Rosen explores contemporary and historical migrations through his family’s personal experience and from a global perspective on the ongoing migration drive across Europe.

He is among the first poets who visited schools extensively across the UK and even overseas, talking about poetry and literature and the ways it can help us see the world around us with humour and empathy. “Michael Rosen has a rare, invaluable gift: the ability to address the most serious matters of life in a spirit of joy, humour and hope. Fearless in holding power to account, his work is nevertheless a lesson in humanity, and how in times of vulnerability we may discover the best version of ourselves,” said Amber Massie-Blomfield, another jury member of this year’s PEN Pinter prize.

Born to an educationalist father and a teacher mother, Rosen grew up around books. His parents’ activism and their eclectic circle of friends that included literary figures such as the critic Wayne Clayson Booth and poet and theosophist Beatrice Hastings (pen name of Emily Alice Haigh) had a profound influence on him. Rosen knew early on that he wanted to write — his first attempt at writing satirical poems about people he knew came when he was merely 12.

Afterwards, a year at Middlesex Hospital Medical School later, he moved to Wadham College in Oxford to study English. It was there that he realised that he also had a flair for acting. It would be the stepping stone towards a career in performance poetry. After starting off his career as a playwright with the play Backbone, Rosen worked at the BBC for a while till his left-leaning socialist views led him to go freelance in 1972.

Rosen’s first book of children’s poems, Mind Your Own Business, came out in 1974. At present, he is a professor of children’s literature at Goldsmiths, University of London..

Source : Indian Express