Tucked neatly beneath Allbrook House, a “slab block” of maisonettes on the Alton West Housing Estate in Roehampton, is a public library. It was here, beneath the domed concrete roof, that children’s laureate Joseph Coelho nurtured an early love of reading. “I remember going there as a very young child and running to the oversized book section. It had books on unexplained mysteries – the Yeti and the Loch Ness monster – as well as Fungus The Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs,” he recalls. “Libraries have always been very important to me, growing up and throughout my life. They certainly made me a reader and, by extension, a writer.”
Coelho published his first poetry anthology, Werewolf Club Rules, in 2014. It went on to win the Centre for Literacy in Primary award and he has since become a prolific author of children’s, YA and middle-grade titles. These include Ten-Word Tiny Tales, published earlier this year, which Guardian reviewer Imogen Russell Williams called a “playful, unsettling” collection featuring “broken hamster cages, underwater carnivals and bears in outer space”. In 2019, while touring his work, Coelho pledged to join one library in every local authority as part of an ambitious, UK-wide “library marathon”. This week, he will make the last of 213 pit-stops – in Liverpool, Bury and the Isle of Man – before concluding his tour with a daylong celebration at The British Library. The marathon kicked off before Coelho was appointed the 12th children’s laureate in 2022 and chimed with news that 773 UK libraries had closed since 2010.
