Morag Styles, who has died from cancer aged 77, pushed forward the boundaries of academic understanding in the previously neglected fields of children’s literature, picturebooks and poetry education. She spent the bulk of her career, from the 1970s onwards, as a teacher educator at Homerton College, Cambridge, and in 2011 became the first professor of children’s poetry at Cambridge University. This was the crowning recognition of a distinguished career, but it was made even more remarkable by her having no formal academic qualifications beyond studying for an ordinary degree.
Morag’s first love was poetry, but she was a versatile teacher with wide-ranging interests in literature, language, creative writing and the arts. In the 1980s, alongside her teaching at Homerton, she began publishing extensively, including a series of influential poetry anthologies. The first of these, I Like That Stuff: Poems from Many Cultures (1984), introduced younger readers to a range of then under-represented African Caribbean, Asian and Black British writers. Morag had a deep affinity with Caribbean poetry. As with another of her great loves, Robert Burns, she was drawn to its vital connection with oral culture, its musicality, and the rich articulation of ordinary men and women’s creative resilience.
