The success of the first-world-war novel War Horse boosted the award-winning children's author Michael Morpurgo into the literary stratosphere. Thirty years later he returns to the "war to end war" as the editor of an anthology of writing about the conflict aimed at younger readers.

He reads Raymond Briggs's selection, Aunties, in which the author of The Snowman recalls the generation of women who came of age during the first world war, and explains the pull of those years on his imagination to two members of the Guardian children's website. He also describes what it's like to watch War Horse performed in a theatre once frequented by Hitler, how he's not a hero, why no subject is too painful for young readers, and why he decided to write a novel from a horse's point of view.

Reading list
Only Remembered edited by Michael Morpurgo and illustrated by Ian Beck (Jonathan Cape)