INTERVIEW


By the Dart INTERVIEW CELIA WARREN


CHILDREN’S AUTHOR & POET Interview by Kate Cotton


certainly be described as a prolific writer. her poems and stories have appeared in hundreds of anthologies; she is a frequent contributor to BBc television and radio;and is published by many educational publishers, including schofield & sims, collins, scholastic, pearsons group in the uK, usa and hong Kong and Oxford university press. she is also a regular writer in schools, using skills from


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her previous teaching career and recently enthralled young visitors to plymouth’s city museum and art Gallery with her poems and stories about mini beasts, including Alex the Ant and Don’t Poke a Worm till it Wriggles. she said: “I’ve always enjoyed


ith a whopping 110 published books under her belt, children’s author and poet Celia Warren could


words - playing with words, learning and speaking foreign languages, solving word puzzles and cryptic crosswords - and it’s wonderful to be making a living from writing them.” “poetry is a fantastic medium for children. It’s very confidence building when they’re learning to read and write, with its rhyme, alliteration and repetition and children enjoy the freedom to play with the sounds of words.” celia grew up in Brigg, north lincolnshire, a market


town near scunthorpe. she studied to be a teacher at loughborough University in the


1970s,


“I love Dartmouth. I love the coastal path and the sea – it’s different every time you look at it. And it’s such a fantastic place in which to write poems and stories.”


where she met her Devonian husband. They lived in the midlands for 30 years and celia taught infants’ classes. after a break to raise her family she returned to teaching as a part-time peripatetic teacher of children with specific learning difficulties, across the whole primary age range. her work with literacy skills and phonics led to her being published in educational reading programmes and then being commissioned to write a book of phonic poems by educational publisher Ginn. This educational publishing work has now built up to a sizeable amount, with celia regularly contributing storybooks in mainstream educational series, such as the Oxford reading Tree and literacy Web and the collins Big cat series. she has recently extended her best-selling comprehension series for schofield and sims, who also published her poetry anthology and teaching guide, A Time to Speak and A Time to Listen. compiling her earlier RSPB Anthology of Wildlife Poetry was a


labour of love. she chose over 130 poems, some specially commissioned, plus some of her own. she said: “It’s great now I’m established in the educational publishing industry, because editors move around a lot and tend to take their writers with them. I’m always happy to make any changes required and editors have said I’m easy to work with. you can be precious about your work and it sits in a drawer and nobody reads it. I’d rather be adaptable and be published.” celia has been writing increasingly intensively over


The Snail by Celia Warren


‘Quaint and quirky, never quick, mother nature’s glue stick, hard shell, tacky tail, Glue the garden, mr Snail’


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