Empowering children with words
As applications open for the next Children’s Laureate Wales and Bardd Plant Cymru, Jenny White caught up with the current incumbents to learn what they’ve achieved so far and how they will spend the last months of their tenure...
AS CHILDREN’S Laureate Wales 2021-2023, Connor Allen has spent a lot of time in schools. He’s written and performed poetry for children, led writing workshops and acted as a role model for the poets of the future.
The one motive that underpins all this work is the desire to help each child see how special they are: “My whole tenure is about trying to empower children to believe that they are miracles,” he says.
“I tell them, ‘There are eight billion people on this planet, but there’s only one who laughs and smiles and writes and cries and runs the way that you do’.
“It’s really about empowering children and I really hope that from getting to know me and my poetry they get a sense of, ‘I’m me and I can do anything I want’.”
In line with this mission, his first book of children’s poetry is titled Miracle. It comes out in May, hot on the heels of his debut poetry book, Dominos, which comes out in March. The releases are just two of the many events he has lined up for his final year as laureate. He took on the role in October 2021 and will remain in
the post until this autumn, as will his Welsh language equivalent, Bardd Plant Cymru Casi Wyn.
A new Children’s Laureate Wales and a new Bardd Plant Cymru are appointed every two years and applications have just opened for the 2023-2025 positions. In the meantime, Casi and Connor will be busy running workshops in schools, taking part in events and festivals, writing commissioned pieces and more.
Both writers are embody what can be achieved through a career in words. Casi Wyn is a singer and songwriter, writer and co-founder of the magazine and independent publisher Codi Pais. Connor is a trained actor whose autobiographical grime-theatre mash-up show, The Making Of A Monster, ran at the Wales Millennium Centre in November last year.
He branched into writing after John McGrath, the founding artistic director of National Theatre Wales, encouraged him to make the leap.
“He pushed me towards a scratch night in writing and that was it, really,” he says. “I started writing a lot more and then combined the acting and the writing together.