Great range of beers and sophisticated soft drinks
Photograph of Michael Rosen by Graham Turner for the Guardian
Michael Rosen So They Call You Pisher!
Michael Rosen helps celebrate our 40th birthday with stories from his humorous and moving memoir
“If you didn’t know whether to risk doing something, what’s the worst that could happen? ‘So they call you pisher!’ ”
In this memoir, Michael Rosen recalls the first twenty-three years of his life. Born in the north London suburbs, his parents,
Harold and Connie, both teachers, first met as teenage communists in the 1930s Jewish East End. The family home was filled with stories of relatives in London, the
United States and France and of those who had disappeared in Europe.
Unlike the children around them, Michael Rosen and his brother Brian grew up dreaming of a socialist revolution; party meetings were held in the front room, and summers were for
communist camping holidays. It all changed after a trip to East Germany in 1957, when his parents decided to leave ‘the party’. Michael followed his
own journey of radical self-discovery: running away to the Aldermaston march to ban the bomb, writing and performing in experimental political theatre, getting arrested
during the 1968 movements.
“About a year before I was born, my brother died; he was not yet two. I don’t know the exact dates of his birth or the death. They were never marked or
mentioned in our house or anywhere else. There was no memorial for him. There were no framed photos of him in our house. He was invisible. My arrival into the world
must have been a mixture of delight and dread. Delight that I had come along to fill up the gap left by the one before. Dread that I could go too… I must have been
the replacement child. Perhaps I was also a cough waiting to happen. Every snuffle, every slight rasp of a breath must have given them reason to worry.” –
Michael Rosen
Michael Rosen is the author of over 140 books of poetry, stories and politics. He was the Children’s Laureate between 2007 and 2009 and is
currently the Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has won numerous international awards for his work in literature. He presents
Word of Mouth on BBC Radio 4.
“The lovely thing about Rosen’s writing is that it is rooted in the reality of his own post-war childhood – you can smell the matzo bray his father
makes as a treat when his mother is out, hear the wheels squeak on his go-kart, sense the thrill of him and his ten-year-old friend Mart on holiday climbing the Sugar
Loaf mountain and crossing from Wales into England with their trousers down.” – Guardian
“Throughout his career, Rosen has inspired children and adults to fall in love with reading.” – Independent
“In his writing, he puts on no airs; his literary background (English degree from Wadham, Oxford) has not held him up – or back. Sometimes his writing is
so simple, you wonder at it: how did he resist the temptation to dress it up? He knows – in his work at least – when to stop.” – Kate
Kellaway, Observer
Interested in learning more about Newham Bookshop and some of the people connected with it? We have four lessons for classroom or family use developed from On the Record’s oral history project centered around Newham Bookshop, Writing and Reading Newham. Click here for full details.
Newham Bookshop is LoveReading’s Bookshop of the Month
We are proud that Newham Bookshop is LoveReading’s Bookshop of the Month. The article features a Q&A with Vivian Archer, which you can read here.
