About James
James Winston Henry Carter (what are you sniggering at?) is a children's poet, non-fiction writer and musician.
At the age of 8, James wrote his first poem, The Electrified Spiders. He shouted it out whilst playing along with some biscuit tin drums. At the age of 15, he took up the electric guitar instead and played in rock bands for the next 20 years, doing gigs all over, from Norway to London to Cornwall.
Mmmm...what else? James lives in Oxfordshire with his two ukuleles (’Erik’ & ’Derek’), his two delightful daughters and his lovely wife (none of which are called ’Erik’ or ’Derek’), and their two pets (the-cat-that-drinks-the-bathwater, that’s ’Dylan’, and the-cat-that-eats-slugs, that’s ’Hollie’).
Every time he visits a school, children ask Where do you get your ideas from?
– to which he replies that he gets his ideas from the magic wood
at the back of his house.
Seriously though, James believes there is a magic wood – your imagination – which takes things from your life, things you’ve done, seen, daydreamed, remembered – and turns these into poems.
Creativity needs plenty of daydreaming - wandering off in your head to see what wonders you can come up with. James truly believes that there should be 10 minutes set aside for daydreaming in every school and every day.
Always listening to music, James’ faves include jazz, Tom Waits and The Beatles, The Beatles, The Beatles. He loves dung beetles too. More about those beauties in a minute.
Reading (not Reading!) is something that he has always been mad about. As a boy he loved comics and TinTin books. James visits his local library every week to get his new supply of books. He has always been a wordy bird. He loves writing poems more than anything else because he likes to think about things - have inky thinky thoughts and then turn them all into little word worlds called ’poems’. And poems – for James – are THE best places to gather your thoughts and are officially the most fun you can have with words. Seriously!
There are many things that James loves to write about, including animals, nature, science and space – either as poems or non-fiction books. He’s now written over 50 books. Blimey! James has also written a whole number of poems about his two favourite creatures – wolves and dung beetles. He even has a plastic paperweight with three little dung beetles inside, ’Magic’ Myrtle, ’Babs’ Barbara and ’Slightly Naughty’ Norman. James says there is nothing weird about that at all. Nothing!
Everywhere he goes, James takes his back pack which contains his poem notebook, his poems folder (full of 100s of pages of tweaky scribbles), the book he’s currently reading and of course a biscuit or two. And whenever he visits schools he takes his melodica (that’s ’Steve’) and one of his ukuleles (either ’Erik’ or ’Derek’). Why? Because it’s good to get the teachers dancing. Obviously!
Reading (not reading!) is where James was born on November 27, 1959. He can’t remember a single thing about it.