Nii Ayikwei Parkes is Booktrust's second online writer in residence. Click here to visit the writer in residence page Click here for Nii's biography

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  • Interview with Nii Ayikwei Parkes [2] What makes a good poet?

    Posted Thursday January 14th 2010
    by Nikesh Shukla

    Watch part 2 of our video interview with writer in residence Nii Ayikwei Parkes about what he feels makes a good poet.

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  • The Gruffalo

    Posted Wednesday January 13th 2010
    by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

    And suddenly one year is gone and another begins. But what a lovely holiday it was; lots of snow, wind, chaos and, best of all, The Gruffalo on the television. I’ve always loved The Gruffalo, brilliantly derived from a traditional Chinese tale- the mouse is a classic trickster character, like the best of the Mmutlas, Brer Rabbits and Ananses. He’s terrified, but he thinks on his feet and comes out smiling. What I specifically like about the animated BBC version is the metaphoric resonance in the casting. See, the mouse is this tiny thing, an ant with the heart of a gi-ant and to bring him to life, to pump this large, large heart into his voice, the BBC picked James Corden, a real big boy. Just the right size to take on Robbie Coltrane as the Gruffalo!  The best thing about watching it over the Christmas holiday, though, was that it was my daughter’s first speaking Christmas, and watching The Gruffalo with her was such a surreal experience; while I was focused on story, she was enthralled by imagery, so every once in a while she’d say ‘Look!’ and the entire experience would shift on the turning of an…

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    • Nom de Plume

    Posted Monday December 14th 2009
    by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

    A few years ago I used to wonder why people had pen names, especially when it was no secret who they actually were. And now I’m about to have a book released under a pen name so I thought it would be interesting to share my reasons. The primary reason is that I write for both adults and children; while I may not have considered that a problem in the past, I have now spent a lot of time in bookshops (reading mainly, of course, because my budget can’t cover the extent of my consumption) and noticed how people order books (it’s not dissimilar to the way some revellers request songs from a DJ in a night club). I’ve overheard grandparents come in and say things like: ‘I want that book by so-and-so as a present for my grandchild’ – which is fine if you have a perceptive bookseller. But imagine if the grandchild in question was actually a child and you had a dozy bookseller who picked out the latest book you had written for adults and handed it over. Not a great result.

    So now I understand why someone who writes in two genres might want to make…

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  • The Plosives

    Posted Monday November 30th 2009
    by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

    I spend more and more time with my daughter these days and she is teaching me an infant poetry all over again. She has a particular obsession with what elocution professionals call ‘plosives’ at the moment, with her favourite sound being the letter ‘b’. Her most common word is ‘book’ and variants of the word ‘book’- all I hear some days is book-a-book-a-bok-bok-bok for hours and hours and hours.

    But one thing is clear- she appreciates the rhythm of it all; it is all said at a particular tempo and sometimes she claps as she mumbles. So for her, maybe, these are the roots of music and musicality, but I’m sure every parent has a different experience. Some children respond to shapes, some to facial expressions, some to colours… an entire gamut of things- and that diversity of development trajectories is one of the reasons I am always grateful to Georgia Popoff, a US-poet, for sharing her approach to work in school with me when I was just beginning to do run workshops. One of the key tools she shared with me was her alphabet poem (I still use a modified version of it) a 26-page poem which has a…

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  • An interview with Booktrust writer-in-residence, Nii Ayikwei Parkes [1]

    Posted Friday November 6th 2009
    by Nikesh Shukla

    In part 1 of our interview with writer-in-residence Nii Aykwei Parkes, we ask him about good poetry, performing and his early gigs.

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