Michael Rosen is extraordinary. At 77, our former children’s laureate has written, or had a hand in, more than 200 books, but it is the quality of the work that counts: enduringly funny, light yet deep. When we meet, he brings along a mini-library of his recently published titles, including his latest memoir, Getting Better, and a reassuring picture book, The Big Dreaming, and The Incredible Adventures of Gaston le Dog, for older children, and a volume of which he is especially proud, the French translation of his poems about migration: On the Move. It has been a red letter year for Rosen, not least because he was awarded the Pen Pinter prize for a “fearless body of work”.
Has surviving Covid changed your life (the vision in his left eye is impaired, his left ear ditto) and your approach to writing?
I keep having ideas… so I write them down. But I do have some problems with memory. The period before I went into the induced coma is blurry. People tell me things like: “Hey, you remember that time there was an anniversary for your book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt?” And I go, “No”, and they say: “Yes, there was a great big cake with all the characters made out of marzipan in a big room at Southbank?” I’ve completely wiped it. It has made me more of an existentialist than ever. We are born into history. But there’s another way in which we are in the moment. Having loss of memory gives me even more of a sense I’m right in the now.
The Big Dreaming makes me feel I wouldn’t mind hibernating, like the bears in the story, for a dream-filled winter. Do you remember your dreams?
Quite well – I jot them down. They are often benign but sometimes full of strange anxieties. Yeah, the other night, I had a dream: I was very high on the window sill of a school gym – just tucked in there. And they said: “You’re able to get down, Mike, it’s OK.” And I said: “No, no, I can’t.” I was 50 feet up. And it was a narrow ledge. I was utterly precarious. Then somebody said: “Well, get a ladder then.” I said: “I can’t get a ladder because I’m up here.”
And can you do a speedy dream interpretation?
Anxiety about physical precariousness, which I’ve experienced since Covid.
In The Big Dreaming, you have three catchphrases – “happiness right now”, “safe path home” and “have hope”. Why this trio?
Happiness is worth striving for but the problem is, the more you strive for it, the less you get it. You have, somehow, to happen upon it in a light way. And about the safe path back home… one thing I learned in rehab is that, at the end of the day, you have to help yourself.
And hope?
You can’t go to the next minute if you don’t have hope. My daughter once said: “Dad, you’re an optimistic nihilist.” I said: “What’s that?” And she said: “Well, you don’t believe in anything divine but you’re optimistic about life.” And I said: “Yes, it’s not much fun to be pessimistic about it.” So always have hope. It can be hard to find. But always have it.
How did Gaston le Dog show up and why was he such a favourite with your son Emile?
My children have all, at some time, said: tell me a story, Dad. And, like all parents, I kind of panic and go dry – and it’s even worse for me because I somehow think my reputation is on the line. I found one way of getting around it with my daughter… I’d say: think of three things. And she’d come up with three random things – a leaf, a doughnut, a rabbit – and I’d make up the story round them. Emile did not give me any clues. I happened upon the idea of le dog because for years I’d been holidaying in the Pyrenees with a French family and the dad described their dog as le dog. And I just thought this was hysterically funny. Gaston came from a sketch [the writer] Nigel Williams and I did at university – a parody of the French Resistance.
Gaston (like the children in We’re Going on a Bear Hunt) faces apparently insurmountable obstacles that turn out to be surmountable. How important is the idea of life as an obstacle course in fiction?
It is central. The person who told us about this was the great structuralist Vladimir Propp, who wrote Morphology of the Folktale. The novel as a whole rests on it. Think of Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Madame Bovary – there are obstacles and helpers. As a modernist, you can sometimes be the obstacle – hinder yourself.
Your book has a garnish of French vocab, a dragonfly called Libellule… It seems you have a particular fondness for France?
I do. I’ve been going to France since I was five and was there the other day at the memorial commemoration of my father’s uncle who was deported on convoy 62 from Paris-Bobigny to Auschwitz.
You won the Pen Pinter prize for a fearless body of work. Is “fearless” the adjective you’d apply to yourself?
No, not really – although when I first started writing poems, some people were appalled because it was free verse and quite slangy. It was as if Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses were suddenly full of weeds – horrible thistles. It hadn’t ever occurred to me but perhaps this was kind of fearless. One thing I say to children is that the great thing about writing is to make it trial and error without fear of failure. You don’t want fear because it will inhibit you.
Are there any don’ts when writing for children?
One don’t is: don’t drift off describing things that aren’t part of the story. We like to do that as adults because it gives us a space in which to set people, but children get quite irritated. And the other thing you must never lose sight of is that, in a children’s book, the child must be the agent. You mustn’t take the meat and potatoes of the story away from the child. Keep the child in view.
What do you read when you need cheering up?
Memoirs – most recently, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be by Colin Grant, which explores the Caribbean diaspora in Britain through the eyes of his family. It is wonderful.
Your favourite book as a child?
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner.
Which classic novel are you most ashamed not to have read?
Bleak House. When I’ve seen too many adaptations on TV or on film, I get lazy.
Who is your favourite literary hero?
Hamlet.
What book might people be surprised to find on your bookshelf?
Emily Dickinson. People might think I wouldn’t read an American proto-feminist in her own private world but her experiments with verse are incredibly exciting.
What sort of reader were you as a child?
Voracious.
What book would you like to be given for Christmas?
A very good translation of Dante’s Inferno – in large print.
• The Incredible Adventures of Gaston le Dog is published by Walker Books (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• The Big Dreaming is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
