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Michael Morpurgo is one of Britain's best loved writers for children with sales of over 35 million copies. He has written over 150 books and won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize and the Whitbread Award. In 2005 he won the Blue Peter Book Award for his novel Private Peaceful, which was also adapted into an acclaimed stage play. His subsequent book, The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips, spent an astonishing 20 weeks in the bestseller charts, and his enormous success has continued with his most recent novels, Alone on a Wide Wide Sea and Born to Run. Michael was Children's Laureate from 2003 to 2005. The charity Farms for City Children, which he founded thirty years ago with his wife Clare, has now enabled over 60,000 children to spend a week living and working down on the farm. He was knighted in 2018 for services to literature and charity. Michael Morpurgo is, in his own words, "oldish, married with three children, and a grandfather six times over." After schools in London, Sussex and Canterbury (one of which was horrible enough to inspire him to describe it obliquely in The Butterfly Lion), he went on to London University to study English and French, followed by a job in a primary school in Kent. It was there that he discovered what he wanted to do. "We had to read the children a story every day and my lot were bored by the book I was reading. I decided I had to do something and told them the kind of story I used to tell my kids – it was like a soap opera, and they focussed on it. I could see there was magic in it for them, and realised there was magic in it for me."
<p style="margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1.3em; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">"I'm not a king or a Wizard... but I do have a story to tell."Meet Ben Bundle. He likes shing and snorkelling, jumping o rocks and exploring the magical island of Bryher with his friends.But after an accident leaves Bun blind, he fears his days of adventure are over. Until one day he is swept into the realm of his favourite story, the ancient legend of King Arthur, and Bun's world changes forever.Get ready for a gripping adventure where a broken promise, a magic sword and a ghostly king reveal to Bun a life-changing quest of his own.A tale about magic, mystery, hope, love, triumph and disaster, The Sleeping Sword weaves a contemporary tale of self-discovery with Arthurian legend in a way that is utterly spellbinding.</p>
