Roger McGough was a member of the group Scaffold in the 1960s when he contributed poems to the Penguin title The Mersey Sound, which has since sold over a million copies and is now available as a Penguin Classic. He has published many books of poems for children and adults, and both his Collected Poems (2004) and Selected Poems (2006) are also available in Penguin. He presents Poetry Please on Radio 4 and is President of the Poetry Society. He was honoured with the Freedom of the City of Liverpool in 2001 and with a CBE in 2005 for services to literature.
He is a true original and more than one generation would be much the poorer without him-The Times Memorable and enduring and fresh. Age has not withered [his lines] nor diminished their potency. Of how much modern poetry can you say that?-Sunday Herald McGough's trademarks: the craft worn as lightly as the crown, the jokes that are something more, the underlying heartache, the acute sense of the way time slips away-Poetry Review