One day, when 12-year-old Joseph Coelho was watching television, he witnessed something that haunted him.
A performing bear, captured as a young cub, that spent most of its life in a cage and was cruelly forced to dance to entertain people.
Joseph had not given much thought to being an author before then, “I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I could be a writer,” he recalls, “writers were special people who existed elsewhere in far off places,” but as he watched the programme he empathised with the bear’s plight and words that captured the suffering he had seen poured out of him.
Joseph called the poem Unbearable and entered it for his local poetry competition. If this were a fairy-tale, Joseph would have walked off with the prize whilst highlighting the severe plight of bears forced to live in such conditions, but although he did not win and the poem has since been lost, Joseph recalls it awakened a desire to explore different poetic forms.
Joseph Coehlo on the importance of Sharing Poetry
After that Joseph regularly wrote poems that expressed his feelings, his worries and his life, and he shared them with his friends at school, though, he recalls, they were not always receptive. On one memorable occasion a classmate proceeded to loudly correct every grammatical error he had made but Joseph did not let this distract him. “Poem is written to be shared,” he insists.
Infact, he recently discovered that his grandmother, now in her nineties, has been writing poems for decades in greeting cards she sends to with her friends.
“There is something incredibly life affirming about that moment when an audience leans in to savour every last syllable of a beautifully spoken word or line…”
- Joseph Coehlo
He was particularly inspired by the visit of the Jamaican poet, Jean Binta Breeze, to his school where she performed a poem about "the softest touch". If writing his poem about bears taught Joseph that poetry could describe and transcend suffering in a way that prose often cannot, then watching Binta Breeze perform to his classmates, demonstrated that poetry also had the power to capture the attention of a crowd. He watched her and realised, this can actually be a job.
“There is something incredibly life affirming about that moment when an audience leans in to savour every last syllable of a beautifully spoken word or line…” he later recalled.
After completing university, where he studied archeology, he spent years honing his abilities as a poet. If there was an apprenticeship to becoming Children’s Laureate, then Joseph has certainly completed it.
Joseph Coehlo's Poetry Apprenticeship
Alongside working as a gym instructor and salesman, Joseph was also a performance poet, a playwright and visited schools and libraries across the country sharing and encouraging pupils to write poems of their own. It was meetingthe publisher Janetta Otter-Barry at the London Book Fair that led to the publication of his first poetry collection and set him on the winding journey to becoming Children's Laureate.
Joseph Coehlo's Advice for Writers
In a recent Zoom interview, hosted by JerichoPrize and ScholasticUK, I asked his opinion for emerging authors on how to handle the sometimes tricky issue of author's fees for school or library visits.
Joseph's advice was sound. He acknowledged that author's should always be reimbursed, but for newly emerging poets and writers reimbursement could initially come in the form of the library or school supporting the author in other ways - for instance photographs of the visit or by tweeting about it on social media. "Interacting with readers is my favourite bit of being an author," he explains. "It's something you need to have a passion for."
His stories show how life-affirming both libraries and books can be. In his popular picture book series, Luna Loves, we see that for Luna visiting the local library is simultaneously a place of exploration and solace, as she and her father, who has separated from her mother, bond over their joint love of books.
His stories show how life-affirming both libraries and books can be.
In Our Tower and he draws upon his childhood, growing up in a towerblock on the outskirts of London, to create a contemporary fable of children who travel from their towerblock into a magical world before realising that there is beauty, and magic too, right where they live.
As Laureate he sees his role as encouraging children not only to read, but also write, and he offers some sage advice.
“Don't ever be envious of those who win prizes. That is temporary. What lasts are your books & the impact it has on the child reading it. That is what remains.”