Click here to access the poetry recordings of Allan Ahlberg as well as a brief biography of this author.

Allan Ahlberg (b. 1938) is one of Britain's best-loved children's writers. The author of over a hundred books, Allan has been delighting children of all ages for more than thirty years. Classic characters like Burglar Bill and The Jolly Postman have become firm favorites with a generation of children who are now reading them to their own offspring. From this page, you can hear the voice of Allan Ahlberg reading five of his poems, "Please Mrs. Butler," "Scissors," "Billy McBone," "The Slow Man," and "Talk Us Through It, Charlotte."

Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.

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