Michael Rosen’s long journey back to health and Cambridge

Michael Rosen is well on the road to becoming a national treasure.

The former Children’s Laureate, who performed at the Corn Exchange last week, caught the national mood – Covid-19 – during the early years of the pandemic with a spirited battle against the virus and its long Covid afters.

Two years later, the 76-year-old poet and author returned to Cambridge (he lives in north London) for a series of events during Refugee Week. We caught up with him to ask how he’s getting on:

Are you back on tour these days?

“Not exactly a tour, but I am working with various organisations around Holocaust memorials and refugees, the Day of Sanctuary and Anne Frank Trust.

“In Cambridge, I’ve been working with Helen Weinstein, director of HistoryWorks, since 2014 and I’ve worked as the HistoryWorks ‘writer in residence’ helping with projects to do with local history and Holocaust Memorial Day. I write poems and I share these with children and their teachers face-to-face through performance: I teach children how to say them, and Helen and her composing team at HistoryWorks have adapted some of these and arranged them into songs. But more than that we have creative dance, and drama, and writing sessions with the students.”

It was a worry seeing you get Covid so severely. How’s it going now?

“I’m fine and doing my exercises and taking my medicines! I was in a coma for 40 days and intensive care for about 48 so it has been quite a long journey back from that. Covid took most of the sight of my left eye and most of the hearing in my left ear. But I’m loving it that I’m now back to live performances, not just online but face-to-face.

“This summer in Cambridge we are holding big sessions with many hundreds of school students in the Corn Exchange and in local schools – about 3,000 youngsters in total. The core book we are using is my set of poems called On the Move: Poems about Migration which is a volume of poems that tell the story of my family in the Holocaust, and also poems which are about refugees and migration.

“The students hear poems and songs which they sing, and then we collectively make up a poem and they start composing poems and songs themselves. This culminated in a performance in the Corn Exchange with a mix of my poetry, song, dance, theatre and children’s own creative writing too.

“What I hope to achieve in the workshops is for young people to see how there is a long history of war, displacement and refugees. I share that history in my own family and we hope that this will enable children and young people to understand the refugee experience.”

The positivity for Ukrainians fleeing the war in their homeland has been very different for Syrians and Afghans. Could more be done?

“Yes, there clearly is a difficulty for the government to see all refugees as being in the same kind of plight. An enormous amount of sympathy has gone out to Ukrainian refugees and hooray for that! But it does seem harder for the government to have the same sympathy for refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, and Sudan.”

We live in challenging – and dangerous – times. How do you stay positive?

“I have to work very hard to stay optimistic. I lost a son in 1999 who died of meningitis and then my experience of the Covid illness has at times made me feel very precarious and fragile. This has come as quite a shock to me.

“I guess I’ve coped thanks to first my wife and family together with the NHS, but also from a huge amount of support from teachers, health professionals, and people I’ve collaborated with like Helen Weinstein here in Cambridge at HistoryWorks, all of whom constantly ask me to write, or perform, or talk.

“On top of that I do give myself quite a strong exercise regime which is not so much about the body beautiful! But [it is] about feeling that I’m able to have some control over changes in my body. In fact I’m writing a book about it which will come out in January, which is called Getting Better.”

HistoryWorks is collecting donations for the Refugee Hardship Fund which is administered by Cambridge Ethnic Community Forum Refugee services – click here to make a donation.