I couldn't write after my heart surgery...

AFTER going to the GP with what he thought was indigestion last year, bestselling children’s author Sir Michael Morpurgo found himself undergoing a triple heart bypass - and an enforced break from writing.

- Bestselling children’s author Sir Michael Morpurgo tells HANNAH STEPHENSON about his return to writing adult non-fiction for the first time in 40 years

“We all have this cliche that you've got pains in your chest and it's agony. Oh no, I went to my wonderful NHS doctor in Hatherleigh in Devon and I said, ‘Look I think I’m getting indigestion rather too often and it’s rather strange because it always comes in the same place between my shoulder blades.

“Within 10 days I was having it done because it was found all three arteries were blocked and they wouldn’t let me out of hospital because it was too serious,’ the 81-year-old former children’s laureate and bestselling author of War Horse recalls.

“I've had operations before, I've been in hospital rather too often but this was by far the most serious. It was six-and-a-half hours under the knife but what I remember afterwards was the marvel of it, the fact that they take a vein from your leg and replumb it and use it as an artery into your heart.”

When he left hospital, he found trouble writing, he reveals.

“I couldn't really concentrate because after that my mind had gone somewhere else, but it’s gathered itself now, mostly. An enforced break wasn’t really good for me. It lowered my spirits not to be writing. Now, I’ve always got a project and I like that.”

The young people he meets in the course of his work, whether it’s one of his plays or to talk about his many books, always lift his spirits, he continues. He and his wife Clare have three children, eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren with another on the way, and you get the feeling they keep him young. “One of the reasons I love being with young people is they help me lift my head up and look upwards and forwards.”

Today, he recognises how lucky he has been and lives for the day - but there’s a lot of looking back on fond memories, he agrees.