Paul Cookson

Paul lives in Retford with his wife, two children, a dog and several ukuleles. He has worked as poet since 1989 and since then has visited thousands of schools and performed to hundreds of thousands of pupils and staff.

Paul is the official Poet In Residence for the National Football Museum.

He is also Poet Laureate for Slade.

And he worked as the Poet for Everton Collection at Liverpool Library.

He was poet in residence for the magazine Literacy Time Plus and wrote specific poems and teachers’ resources.

Paul is a National Reading Hero. As part of the National Year of Reading he was recently nominated for a Reading Hero Award, which he received at 10 Downing Street. He is the only poet to receive this award.

His work has taken him all over the world – including visits to Argentina, Uganda, Malaysia, Singapore, Beijing, Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland.

Recently, he was invited to Clarence House for a Literary Lunch with The Duchess of Cornwall, alongside other writers such as Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard, Jacqueline Wilson, Shirley Hughes, Anthony Browne and Axel Scheffler.

His work has appeared on Match of The Day, Radio 5 Live, Radio 2, The World Service, CBBC, Sky Sports, Talksport Radio, The Everton match day programme and The Sun.

He has written poems celebrating a variety of footballers – including Brian Labone, Dixie Dean, Howard Kendall, Neville Southall, Alex Young, Joe Royle and Graeme Sharp and performed them at official Everton events.

His poem about Brian Labone was read by Ian Callaghan at his funeral and has appeared in the Everton Match day programme.

Former Everton, Leeds and Nottingham Forest player Duncan McKenzie used a poem by Paul in his autobiography – The Last Fancy Dan.

He co-ordinated a poetry exhibition for the National Football Museum. As part of this he wrote a set of commemorative poems for the England team of 1966. He has since met six of the team and they now have the poems written about and for them.

He was once a substitute for John Cooper Clarke at the Sheffield Off The Shelf Festival and also stood in for Andrew Motion at the Warwick University Arts Centre with European Chamber Orchestra.

His performances are always memorable, lively and extremely funny. Audience participation is non negotiable! WARNING : may contain ukuleles.

He has a vast experience of leading workshops with all age groups and abilities and firmly believes that everyone can write poems.

With over sixty titles to his name, Paul has sold well over three quarters of a million books and his poems appear in over two hundred other books. Best known collections include The Poetry Store, Pants on Fire, The Truth About Teachers, I’d Rather Be A Footballer, Give Us A Goal , Spill The Beans, The Truth About Parents, The World At Our Feet and It’s Behind You! As well as a tenth anniversary edition of perennial best seller – The Works ( now sold over 160,000 copies )

For Macmillan alone, his sales have averaged at 180 books a day for the last twelve years