Love letters to libraries: Michael Morpurgo

The author of War Horse makes a passionate plea for free books for children - and demonstrates their importance with a scene from his novel I Believe in Unicorns, in which a very special librarian inspires a small boy’s love for books and reading

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Michael Morpurgo is the last of five distinguished authors to share his love of libraries with us this week to mark Book Week Scotland. In place of a letter to a particular library, the former children’s laureate, author of War Horse and Private Peaceful, pays tribute to all librarians through an excerpt from his book I Believe in Unicorns. In it, the inspiring “unicorn lady” tells a group of children how a fairytale survived the book-burners. Morpurgo also wrote the following introduction to the passage for the Guardian:

Knowing as we do that reading is the key to knowledge and understanding, essential to the fulfilling of young lives, and knowing too there are at least a million children in this country not fully literate when they leave primary school, we all accept that not enough has been done to bring children to books and books to children.

It is the task of all of us as parents, grandparents and teachers to do all we can to encourage their enjoyment of reading. But it is the task of the community to support this endeavour. Illiteracy is most common, we know, amongst those who live in poverty or close to poverty. It is particularly those families that need libraries. The price of a book from a shop may seem cheap to many. For many, such a purchase is simply not possible. We have a duty surely as a society to make sure that no child is denied access to literacy and literature because of social and financial deprivation. Every one of them has a right to be literate.

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