There’s a wonderful lyricism across his writing, figurative and poetic language flows throughout his work. ‘Great children’s writing’, he tells me, ‘whether funny or serious, is much closer to poetry. You’re looking at text that’s sparser, more condensed, more immediate.’ He feels The Afterwards is closer to being a verse novel in prose than a prose novel, but rather than this being a pre-conceived choice, ‘years of writing poetry, reading it and listening to music has just made my voice somewhat poetic and these things just spill in.’ It was the designers at Bloomsbury who came up with the ideas for the typesetting, parts of which resemble concrete poetry, ‘because it was poetic to begin with and because it was a shorter story, we had more space to play with for that sort of thing.’
His most recent poetry collection for children, Things You Find in a Poet’s Beard moves from the cleverly comic to the deeply reflective, as with his novels and I’m delighted to find out that there is more poetry on the horizon. A single poet collection is in the making, scheduled for 2020, is currently ‘in search of an illustrator’. In the meantime, a lavish gift book anthology of food poems, illustrated by Katy Riddell is in production. ‘It’s a book I’m really proud of’, he tells me, ‘full of a really great selection of poems from children’s poets, adult poets, performance poets. It’s got a really diverse range of poets which was really important to me.’ It seems timely that poetry will be his central focus for the next few years. As he says himself ‘Poetry is where it begins and ends, and it’s the thing I’m most wedded to, embedded in, maybe. It’s the thing that I began with, when I was a teenager.’
A.F Harrold books all published by Bloomsbury Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Did P.E. in his Pants 978-1408853399 £5.99
Fizzlebert Stump and the Girl Who Lifted Quite Heavy Things 978-1408853313 £5.99
Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Cried Fish 978-1408842461 £5.99 Fizzlebert Stump and the Bearded Boy 978-1408835210 £6.99 Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away From the Circus (and joined the library) 978-1408830031 £5.99 pbk Greta Zargo and the Death Robots from Outer Space 978-1408869475 £6.99.pbk Greta Zargo and the Amoeba Monsters from the Middle of the Earth 978-1408881774 £6.99 pbk
The Imaginary 978-1408850169 £7.99 pbk The Song from Somewhere Else 978-1681197883 £6.90 pbk The Afterwards, 978-1408894316, £12.99 hbk Things You Find In A Poet’s Beard Burning Eye Books 978-1909136618 £5.99 pbk
Charlotte Hacking is Learning Programme Manager at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, a charity working to improve literacy in primary schools.
Books for Keeps No.233 November 2018 11
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