In the Midst of This, I Write

Michael Rosen’s PEN Pinter Prize 2023 speech

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This speech was delivered at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony at the British Library on 11 October 2023.

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I’ve known of the PEN Pinter Prize since its inauguration, and I have to say it had never crossed my mind that the work I do would ever be regarded as worthy for this honour. Lucky I wasn’t a judge, then. Well, no, as it’s me standing here, I wouldn’t have been, would I? I’ll try not to be overwhelmed by the company I’m keeping here: previous winners, and of course Harold Pinter himself, who we must thank for having created the prize.

Can I spend a few moments talking about Pinter? He was innovative, daring, outspoken and brave. I first came across his work when I was a teenager going along to the Questors Theatre in Ealing, as part of being in the Young Questors Club. This was December 1959. I was 13. I sat in the old converted church on my own, watching a matinee of The Birthday Party. You must remember that Pinter was a new voice in theatre at this time. The word ‘Pinteresque’ hadn’t been invented – not quite. The OED gives its first appearance as being a year later.

So there I am on my own in a draughty old church watching this play with a mix of amazement, horror and mystery. The words being spoken – were they real? Ironic? Or were they, in effect, what I might call ‘shadow’ words – the words that people would speak if they dared or could?

And there’s the word ‘dared’. Even as a 13-year-old, I had a sense that there was something daring about a play that revealed what people secretly thought, desired, and feared. And, for those of you who know the play, you’ll know that it conjures up the image of arbitrary menace, control and punishment. When asked about the play 30 years later, Pinter said, ‘The character of the old man, Petey, says one of the most important lines I’ve ever written. As Stanley is taken away, Petey says, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do.” I’ve lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now.’

And then, talking about three of his plays, Pinter added: ‘It’s the destruction of an individual, the independent voice of an individual. I believe that is precisely what the United States is doing in Nicaragua.’

The critic Michael Billington wrote of The Birthday Party that it’s ‘a deeply political play about the individual’s imperative need for resistance.’ Now, even though I’ve written screeds about the matter, I don’t fully know what we mean when we say a play, a film, a poem – any work of art – has an ‘effect’ on us. Even so, I’m pretty sure something was cooking in 13-year-old Rosen’s head watching The Birthday Party, and some of that was to do with Harold Pinter’s conscious or unconscious mind.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Writing is often – but not always – very individualistic. Being a reader, a viewer or even a theatre-goer can be individual at the very moment of reception. The thing that is written – play, poem, novel – might be about individuals, but both Pinter and Billington were keen to locate that individualism in something social, something political and, in Pinter’s case, something to do with resistance. I can honestly say that I’ve struggled with this for most of my writing life.

Let me put my cards on the table: there’s a lot about the world I live in, the world that my contemporaries have created, that I find profoundly unsatisfactory, unfair, or utterly horrifying. As the PEN Pinter Prize records, all over the world there are people being silenced, incarcerated, persecuted and killed. The world is unjustly, absurdly, grotesquely unequal. And incredibly, after hundreds of years of this unjust, absurd, grotesque inequality, it hasn’t got any better. If anything, it’s got worse. The twin powers of exploitation and oppression seem to be as strong – if not stronger – than they have ever been. As I speak, there are several wars going on, in which civilians are being killed in their thousands – or is it tens of thousands?

In the midst of this, I write. I look around the room: the previous winners, the judges, many of you – perhaps most of you – write too. I know that many of us hover over our bits of paper and keyboards wondering whether what we do makes any difference whatsoever to the wicked way of the world. Or we might wonder: should it?

A few years after I was sitting in that church watching The Birthday Party, I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? Sartre, as you may know, is a hard taskmaster, demanding of us in the Republic of Letters to be committed – ‘engagé’. I confess, I did wonder at the time, But, Jean-Paul, what about jokes? Sometimes they’re important and necessary too, aren’t they?

But don’t let me get distracted.

Let me stay with this concern with writers writing on their own, about individuals, while being perturbed, worried, or, like Pinter, furious with the socio-political torments. What did Michael Billington mean when he said The Birthday Party was deeply political? Ah, yes, he located it in, ‘the individual’s imperative need for resistance’. So let me tease this out a bit: are both Pinter and Billington saying that, through these spectacles we create in writing, it’s possible to show unjust power, or plain injustice, in such a way as to invite readers and watchers to feel a need to resist?

The first winner of this prize was Tony Harrison. Many of you here will know his poems and plays. In one poem he focusses on just one word, a word that I say as ‘us’ but that he, as a boy, pronounced ‘uz’. As a boy at Leeds Grammar School, this was noted and commented on. Socially aspirant Leeds Grammar School boys of the 1950s weren’t supposed to say ‘uz’. It’s as if we are looking through a keyhole – or an even smaller chink or crack than that – into the workings of social class, regionalism, oppression by looking at the use of one word. Or, in the words of modern linguists, ‘at the level of the signifier’.

Despite my doubts as to whether I merit it, I have accepted this award. Nay, been delighted to accept it, if a little overawed by it. I’m no Harold Pinter, no Tony Harrison. Both of them, I think, overcame that problem of how to foster a social reaction – social resistance, even – through individualistic forms.

So can I put it like this: I think this award throws me a challenge; it invites me to ask myself, ‘What have you done, Rosen, to make you think you can accept this award?’

By the way, saying ‘Rosen’ like that to myself conjures up streams of grammar school teachers from the 1950s and 60s – from the benign to the boring, from the encouraging to the crushing, many of them full of the contradictions that stay with you for the rest of your life. For example, imagine this: one teacher once said to me, ‘If we’d had any sense, Rosen, we would have been on the side of the Germans in the Second World War’. Not the most tactful thing to say to a Jewish kid in the 1950s. However, he was the very same teacher who said, as I left the school, ‘Don’t get rubbed out, will you, Rosen?’

Another voice echoing in my head as I say ‘Rosen’ to myself is that of Christopher Hitchens. For some reason, he always called me ‘Rosen’. Perhaps not the Hitchens many of you knew from TV but the earlier version (we all have one of them) who I knew at university. That Hitchens was, I guess, a pub Jean-Paul Sartre. While I drank my orange juice mixed with sparkling water, eating rollmops, Hitchens spent many hours telling me how I ought to sharpen up my act and spend less time pissing about. Well, I say to the late Christopher Hitchens, I like doing both. And, to tell the truth, I rate both. In fact, to complicate matters, sometimes I sharpen up my pissing about. As Shakespeare suggests with the character of Fool in King Lear, there are times when absurdism is a legitimate answer to hate and cruelty.

So, yes, Jean-Paul; yes, Hitchens: there have been times when I’ve been polemical. This may have come out that way because matters seemed to be so pressing – or because Michael Gove was running education – that you couldn’t have stopped me. At other times, it’s been because people have asked me. For ten years or so, the Guardian asked me to write about education from the point of view of curious parent. In fact, more often than not, it was as a furious parent.

Only a couple of weeks ago we read in the Guardian’s sister paper that people who have spoken out against the government’s education policies have been noted, documented and cancelled.  What is it about education that seems to invite people at the top to be so totalitarian even as they insist that education is one of the duties and virtues of democracy? Anyone might think that right-wing libertarianism imposes limits on its libertarianism.

Unless I’ve misunderstood him, I think Sartre rather thought that poetry had its place alongside music, and so didn’t have to obey his demands for commitment. His gaze was fixed on prose writing. By the way, to even things up as regards teachers, a big shoutout for my A-level French teachers, Mr and Mrs Emmans, who taught me Sartre’s Les Mains sales and Voltaire’s Candide.

Isn’t it interesting how preparing a talk like this, starts to throw up connections and disruptions? The Birthday Party, Tony Harrison, Voltaire, and Michael Gove.

Another pressure on my writing – a welcome one – has come from Professor Helen Weinstein, as you’ve heard. Pressures and needs. We could say a lot about that aspect of writing. We often focus on what we call ‘influence’, in the sense of artistic precursors, and not so much on the social circumstances that create pressure, need, and indeed necessity.

What were the pressures that came to bear on Pinter that led him to write The Birthday Party? What hidden forces lay behind the two men who take Stanley away at the end of the play? Less mysterious, perhaps, but no less potent are the ones expressed through the fault lines in Tony Harrison’s poem ‘Uz’.

But again, fixing that gaze on what I’ve been on about, I come to a good deal of work that slots into the category we call ‘children’s literature’. I fell into it by mistake. In my late teens and early 20s, I experimented with writing in a voice that was meant to be something like my own from when I was about 10. For some reason that I am not fully conscious of, I wanted to be an archaeologist of my childhood, and the most suitable form seemed to me then (and still is) a kind of oral writing – a spoken-word narrative, a form of memorable speech, a kind of free verse monologue.

Alongside these, I inherited the wordplay and nonsense of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Spike Milligan – which was, in a way, the unconscious wordplay that that 10-year-old me liked or would have liked.

Thanks to the BBC School Radio producer Joan Griffiths, the great educator Margaret Meek Spencer, and the editor Pam Royds, I was discovered and reframed as a writer for children, and I’ve been doing this for 60 years!

That sentence has an exclamation mark on it.

And what a far cry this is from all that Pinteresque, Sartrean stuff. Or is it? Let me put it this way: if, as an adult, you imagine the world as a 10-year-old might see it, or the way that you saw it when you were 10, it may not be the most subversive thing in the known world, but it sure does bring you up against many of the strange power trips that we as adults go in for.

Right up until this week, I am delighted and amazed to stand in front of 200, 500, on occasions 1500 children, relating stories that happened to me when I was a child in the 1950s in north London to school students and children living lives that are, in many ways, eons away from mine.

I’m very lucky: right from 1974, when my first book came out, teachers, librarians and teacher trainers have asked me to read and perform my poems, even as I’m relating the grossly hyperbolic saga of the teacher who wouldn’t let us breathe in her lessons and who strung us up on the wall bars in the school prison for three weeks with the rats nibbling our toenails. You’ll note, here, that I always believe in telling children the truth.

What’s the laughter doing when I perform this stuff? Is it what the great Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin called subversive laughter and the carnivalesque? Bakhtin answers my plea to Sartre – what about jokes? He asked, what happens when we writers turn the world upside down? That’s what my precursor Malorie Blackman did with her wonderful Noughts & Crosses series, inviting us to see the world we know through a new inverting prism, and so making us see the oppression in the known world.

And that nonsense and word-play stuff? Well, remember what I said about the signifier, the words, the signs we make in order to express meaning? I say, to children, ‘I’ve got a new way to spell the word “everybody”: take one letter at a time off the front of the word, and say what you’ve got left. And you get: everybody, verybody, erybody, rybody, ybody, body, ody, dy, y.’

Is this a disruption at the level of the signifier?

By the way, one of the great mysteries about Lewis Carroll is that he created some of the most disruptive writing ever but was himself a desperately conformist person – not that we have to bother too much about that. I mean, apart from the fun of being nosy, don’t we say let the work stand for itself? Well, the fun of being nosy is such a lot of fun that not many of us stick to that principle. I remember the great subversive poet Adrian Mitchell ticking me off once because I said that I liked the Daniel Craig and Gwyneth Paltrow movie about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. ‘Leave them alone,’ he cried out to me on a night-time car journey. Well, in the nicest possible way, you haven’t left me alone. Thanks very much indeed.

Finally, a brief word about Covid. Well, it’s needs and pressures again, isn’t it? You may have noticed that there is an inquiry going on. I don’t know how long it’ll take. I hope it will tell us that happened. I hope it’ll help us do things better next time. But I couldn’t wait. I did my own enquiry. Well, that’s partly (or perhaps mostly) what writing is. It enquires, investigates, interprets, unearths. It goes somewhere (inside our heads or outside) and reports back. When something is as immense and awful as the pandemic was, I want to be a witness. Because I couldn’t wait, I’ve been my own statutory enquiry.

Before I go, I must thank some people who’ve nurtured and supported me: my parents and brother were (and, in my brother’s case, still is) among the greatest questioners, jokers, probers, wordsmiths I have ever known. My children have done their best to bring me up. They’ve found it to be quite a hard job. Emma took up the pieces of a fragmented person back in 2000 and has done the best she could with challenging material – me. Talking of challenging circumstances, it wasn’t my intention to lumber her and the family with 48 days in intensive care. Her solid stoicism, down to earth realism, is a wonder.

And that reminds me of all those people in the NHS striving to mend and cure people in spite of what look like efforts to hinder them through cuts and privatisation.  The people who looked after me – men and women, many of them with origins from all over the world, working together for the good of humankind – offered a glimpse of something of how we could live if we had the resolve and solidarity to make it happen.

Each year, the PEN Pinter Prize is shared with a Writer of Courage, who is chosen by the winner from a shortlist of PEN’s current cases of concern. This half of the prize is awarded to someone who has been persecuted for speaking out about their beliefs. 

This year’s winner is an acclaimed academic, anthropologist, and a leading expert on Uyghur folklore and cultural traditions, recognised internationally for her unique contribution to the study and cataloguing of Uyghur cultural heritage. She disappeared in late 2017, shortly after making plans to travel to Beijing to participate in an academic conference. She never reached her destination, and it was widely believed that she had been disappeared by the Chinese authorities. Despite international condemnation of her disappearance and a campaign calling for her release, more than three years passed before reports confirmed that the Chinese authorities had sentenced and imprisoned her. Last month, it was widely reported that a sentence of life imprisonment on charges of endangering state security by promoting ‘splittism’, originally handed down in 2018, has now been upheld. Six years since she first disappeared, she continues to be held incommunicado, and her whereabouts remain unknown. 

Standing here in the British library, I could not be more aware of the huge gulf between the kind of freedoms I have, or often take for granted, but are denied to many others in the world.  

I have devoted many hours in my life to the enjoyment and study of folklore – story and song in particular – trying to understand the values, ideas and feelings that these express. I’ve learned a huge amount from this and applied it many times over in my life. My version of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt came out of this interest. 

But my passion for what the American poet Carl Sandburg once called The People, Yes is pushed towards sorrow and anger on hearing that someone could be imprisoned for precisely the kind of interest that I have. This is why I have chosen Rahile Dawut to be this year’s Writer of Courage.  

I should note here that I’ve sometimes moved in circles in my life where people have argued furiously over whether folk music was mired in nostalgia or it was the voice of the exploited, the oppressed and the suppressed. Here, with Rahile Dawut, we can see that the Chinese authorities have in effect decided that argument: simply to record, study and catalogue a people’s culture has been, and continues to be, an act of resistance.  

I must wish her well, fervently hope that whatever we are doing here today helps her case. I want to express admiration for what she has done, and I wish her all the mental and physical strength she needs. Or, as my parents would say: ‘sh’koyech’ a Hebraic Yiddish saying meaning something like a mix of appreciation and wishing strength to someone.

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Michael Rosen is one of Britain’s best loved writers and performance poets for children and adults. His first degree in English Literature and Language was from Wadham College, Oxford and he went on to study for an MA at the University of Reading and a PhD at the former University of North London, now London Metropolitan. He is currently Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London where he teaches critical approaches to reading on an MA in Children’s Literature. He has taught on MA courses in universities since 1994. He was the Children’s Laureate from 2007–2009 and has published over 200 books for children and adults, including the recent bestseller Many Different Kinds of Love and On the Move: Poems about Migration.

Photo credit: George Torode