The book War Horse by Michael Morpurgo is now a best seller, thanks to the long-running play in London and on Broadway, and Steven Spielberg’s movie. Today’s NYT Arts Beat blog quotes the author saying that before the adaptations, “It simply was not a book that anyone really knew about or cared about,” selling just 25,000 copies in its first 25 years. The play brought sales of 950,000 copies and the movie put it at #1 on the NYT Children’s paperback list, where it has remained for the last seven weeks (it rose as high as #17 on the USA Today general list).

Now Morpurgo and his book are getting even more attention. ALA has announced that the author, who is the Children’s Laureate in the UK, will deliver the 2013 Arbuthnot Lecture. Applications for hosting the lecture will be available this spring on the ALSC Web  site.

War Horse: (Movie Cover) Michael Morpurgo Retail Price: $8.99 Paperback: 192 pages Publisher: Scholastic Press – (2011-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 0545403359 / 9780545403351

This entry was posted on Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Books & Movies, Childrens and YA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.