We recently welcomed author AF Harrold. Performance poetry was taken to a new level: AF delighted the audiences, whether Pre-prep, Junior or Senior, before concluding the day with a poetry workshop for the Year 6. AF, a philosopher and former bookseller, started his writing career as a poet, but his books are also well received. It is interesting to notice how different AF style is in his poetry – fun, quirky – and his novel, which he described as a bit ‘spooky’.

His Song from Somewhere Else, for example, between 2017 and 2018 was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, the Greenaway Medal, The UKLA, the Mythopoeic Award for Children’s Fantasy, the Calderdale Children's Book Award, and the Teach Primary New Children's Fiction Award. It eventually was the winner of the Amnesty International/CILIP Honour (2018) and featured on EmpathyLab’s Read for Empathy 2018 list.

The Imaginary was equally popular: longlisted for CILIP Carnegie and CILIP Kate Greenaway Medals (2016) and shortlisted for many other awards, it was also the winner of the UKLA Book Award (7-11 category) (2016) and British Book Design and Production Award (children's category and overall winner) (2015).

This year again his latest book, The World We Leave Behind, is longlisted for both the Carnegie and the Greenaway medals, and we wish AF all the best and ‘third time lucky’.

AF brought a creative spark in his talks, and we hope our pupils will remember how characters and situations can be born from the simplest things, like breakfast for example ….

World Book Day 2023

Staff and boys wandered around the School grounds dressed in the most remarkable ways, having embraced our Dressing Up Day with great gusto. Take a look at the photos below!

Mrs Brill
Head of Classics and Librarian