LoveReading Says
‘I love this book for so many reasons, because of so many people: because of Ted Hughes’s poems, because of the photographs of James Ravilious, because it’s about the place where Clare and I live, where our family grew up, and which helped me grow my stories, War Horse, Private Peaceful and many others, and because it’s a living story still being told everyday.’ Michael Morpurgo
LoveReading
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All Around the Year Synopsis
Originally published in 1979, All Around the Year is a diary following a year at Parsonage Farm, a mixed farm in Devon, close to Dartmoor. The book documented a way of life unchanged for centuries, but which was already remote to most people.
In All Around the Year, Morpurgo revealed the daily hardships and rewards of such a life. The accompanying poems were written by Ted Hughes as diary accounts of events on his own farm, not far from Iddesleigh.
When Michael and Clare were putting together All Around the Year, they seemed a natural fit with the text and photographs.
The book is illustrated with the photographs of James Ravilious from the Beaford Archive.
The book has a new introduction by the prize-winning author Katherine Rundell. ‘The book does not make farming look or sound easy, but it dose make it look and sound profoundly worth doing: a form of stewardship and a form of cherishing, within the practical endeavour of producing food and rearing livestock.’
About This Edition
About Michael Morpurgo
Michael Morpurgo has written over 90 books and has an unparalleled reputation in the world of children's books. His books have been adapted for the cinema, TV and theatre and he has won numerous awards including Children's Book Award, Whitbred Children's Book Award and the Smarties Prize.
Michael Morpurgo is, in his own words, "oldish, married with three children, and a grandfather six times over." After schools in London, Sussex and Canterbury (one of which was horrible enough to inspire him to describe it obliquely in The Butterfly Lion), he went on to London University to study English and French, followed by a job in a primary school in Kent. It was there that he discovered what he wanted to do. "We had to read the children a story every day and my lot were bored by the book I was reading. I decided I had to do something and told them the kind of story I used to tell my kids - it was like a soap opera, and they focussed on it. I could see there was magic in it for them, and realised there was magic in it for me."
Living in Devon, listening to Mozart, and working with children have provided most of the stimulae Michael needs to discover and write his stories. He spends about half his life mucking out sheds with the children, feeding sheep or milking cows; the other half he spends dreaming up and writing stories.
Michael Morpurgo, former Children's Laureate and author of bestsellers such as War Horse and Why The Whales Came, is the inaugural President of the Historical Writers Association beginning in Autumn 2011. The Historical Writers' Association (www.thehwa.co.uk) will celebrate its first anniversary in October. It was founded to bring social and professional support to writers of historical fiction and non-fiction, publishers, agents and booksellers, all bound both by their common interest in historical books and by the sense of community that comes from a shared obsession.
STOP PRESS: The Harrogate History Festival
Author of War Horse and over 130 books, and much-loved by readers of all ages, Michael Morpurgo will be at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate on Friday 23 October. Prepare to be inspired! Click here to find out more.
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