SWINDON LITERARY FESTIVAL: CHILDREN'S poet and author Michael Rosen confessed that he started is writing career as a plagiarist.
He won a writing competition for the first story he ever wrote, about a cat called Solomon who could not find his way home.
The story of Solomon the Cat by Michael Rosen was printed in the local newspaper and everyone was proud of him.
The problem only arose when a couple of weeks later a reader wrote in saying they had bought a book of the same name.
The early notoriety didn't put him off and Rosen told an audience at the University of Bath in Swindon how he became an avid reader of children's literature before becoming a widely published author and broadcaster. The Radio Four presenter is an animated storyteller who had audience members chuckling at anecdotes about his family and school years.
He also read from a collection called Carrying the Elephant, a series of autobiographical poems encompassing the loss of his son, Eddie, to meningitis at the age of 19.
By Bhavanni Vadde
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