Career
He founded and runs the award-winning Poetry Zone website, which encourages children to write and publish their poetry and offers guidance and ideas for teachers on now to make the teaching of poetry fun and rewarding. He has written 24 books, has poems in over 200 children"s anthologies and his teenage verse novel, The Journal of Danny Chaucer (Orion), was broadcast on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4. Roger"s first children"s books were The Howen and then Creeper (Viking).
His first solo collection of children"s poems was I Did Not Eat the Goldfish (Macmillan Children"s Books) (2002).
Other children"s poetry books include The Jumble Book (Macmillan) for Dyslexia Action, A Million Brilliant Poems (Participant One) (A&C Black) (2010) which was shortlisted for the CLPE award. He has written two books with children"s author Brian Moses - Able Writers in Your School (Brilliant Publications)(2008) and Olympic Poems (2012) his best-selling poetry book to date.
In 2012 he published a new work of fiction The Comic Café (Frances Lincoln)
Roger played in a local band (The Pathfinders, which became The Syndicate) from the age of 13-18. He played keyboards in the rock band Damn Right I Got the Blues with author Ken Follett on bass and Floella Benjamin on vocals from 2003 to 2012).
He released a solo album I Don"t Wish to Alarm You (Irregular Records) in 2013.
