I thought that dropping out made me a failure, but it was the making of me as a journalist and writer, says Dr Julia Keller, the author of Quitting: A Life Strategy
Pregnant at 15, and soon to be homeless, O’Sullivan never expected to succeed – but became a leading academic. The author of Poor talks about everything that conspired to keep her down – and her ‘miraculous and rare’ ascent
As a young child, Terri White’s home was a place of sexual violence and fear. But there was always one place she felt safe: school. Here she confronts her past – and meets the teacher who never let her down
A dispiriting new survey has found that nearly a quarter of schools teach poetry only once a year or less. What a shame that is, says children’s laureate, Joseph Coelho
My book makes daunting statistics easy to understand, opening young people up to different ways of thinking about the world, says children’s writer Jackie McCann
The tutor on my exercise science course pointed me towards literature, and I began to read voraciously. It was the start of a love affair that led to my first novel