Michael Rosen 'honoured' to win PEN Pinter Prize

Rosen joins past winners including Malorie Blackman, Lemn Sissay, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie

Author Michael Rosen has said he feels "greatly honoured" to have been awarded this year's PEN Pinter Prize.

The award is for writers of "outstanding literary merit" who take an "unflinching" look at the world.

Known for beloved children's books like We're Going On A Bear Hunt, Rosen has also tackled subjects like migration and the Holocaust for young readers.

English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick called the ex-children's laureate "one of our most tenacious and fearless writers".

She said: "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."

In 2021, Rosen published an account of his experience of being left in a coma with Covid-19, when hospital staff pinned a 2008 poem he wrote for the NHS's 60th anniversary above his bed.

"Even Covid couldn't silence him!" added Borthwick, noting how the judges were "thrilled and honoured" to name him as the winner.

The prize was set up in memory of Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter in 2009 by English PEN, a charity that says it defends freedom of expression and celebrates literature.

Rosen, 77, said winning brought to mind "the many people all over the world incarcerated, tortured or executed for being brave enough to write about what they perceive to be injustice".

Rosen is currently professor of children's literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, having served as children's laureate from 2007 to 2009.

He will receive the award at a ceremony co-hosted by the British Library on 11 October, where he will reveal the identity of an international "writer of courage" who he has chosen to share his award.

Previous winners of the prize include Malorie Blackman, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Lemn Sissay, as well as Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard and Carol Ann Duffy.