Hello, and welcome to my website.

I am a  poet but also a writer of fiction, mainly for children. You may know of me through a story I wrote 35 books ago called Henry’s Leg. This won the Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction because, they told me, ‘it says serious things cheerfully.’ Through the TV adaptation I was able to buy a tiny house in the Yorkshire Dales which has become (as D H Lawrence said of his bit of Nottinghamshire) ‘the country of my heart’.

Last summer I moved from Oxford to a permanent home in my heart country, reconnecting with my Northern roots. Life is a poem I have written about this move.

I have written poetry all my life but only five years ago, on my 60^th birthday, did I decide to set children’s writing aside and focus on poetry. Writing all those books for children has been a good training ground. I have chewed over many millions of words before committing a few select ones to paper (children like directness, pithyness, strong colour and they deserve the best). Emily Dickinson advised few words in a poem then added 'but they must be the chiefest words'. In weaving stories for the young, and not so young, I have sat for many years on my poetic instinct. The poet Kate Clanchy said that my poems have ‘the passion of long-stored speech’ so perhaps waiting for so long to ‘focus’ has had its benefits.

Like me, Thomas Hardy did not turn to poetry until he was 60. Watch this space!