Michael Morpurgo says writing for young audiences is not an inferior art - there is simply good writing and bad. 'You do not write for a lesser audience. You write!' he tells Enda Wyley.

When I meet Michael Morpurgo he has just been reading A Clip by Seamus Heaney. "Such simple and connected access to language," he enthuses. "Who would have thought that remembering a visit to a barber's shop could be a subject for writing a poem?"

And yet, who would have thought that memories of falling off a bike into a ditch, of being given a glass of milk and a jam sandwich by an old lady who lives by the sea, of collecting shells on a beach, or of a lark rising into the sky, could be transformed into some of the finest stories written for children today?

Because this is exactly what Michael Morpurgo has done - fused memory with imagination - in the wonderful stories of his recently published book, Singing for Mrs Pettigrew, a storymaker's journey, a collection as convincing, heartfelt and unforgettable as the rest of the many books (more than 100) that he has published in the past four decades.

Among my own favourites of his novels are Why the Whales Came and Kensuke's Kingdom, both inspired by Morpurgo's travels to Scilly - "that scattering of islands stranded out in the Atlantic beyond Land's End" - a place where he didn't go in search of stories but where they found him. It is this flair for natural storytelling which has won him prestigious literary prizes such as the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year for The Wreck of the Zanzibar, the Smarties Book Prize, the Blue Peter Award, the Red House Children's Book Award and others.

But for all his success, Morpurgo's main concern as a writer is his continual search for an authentic voice. When he was young this voice began to develop with his discovery that he was "good at lies" - a gift he is convinced all true writers must have.

He remembers as a boy going home on the train for school holidays and silencing his friends by declaring "The Queen is coming to my house for tea". For the first time in his young life, Morpurgo realised that stories can actually empower the storyteller and that he had become one.

An endearing, unstoppable conversationalist, Morpurgo now begins to talk more about his childhood. "I grew up surrounded by books." His stepfather, Jack Morpurgo, was a publisher and writer. His grandfather, a bilingual poet and philosopher, had his poetry put to music by Elgar. The house "groaned with books" and yet the young Morpurgo came to fear them - a feeling which developed further during school. An emphasis on punctuation, spelling and neat handwriting meant "a multitude of red crosses and red slashes covered my exercise books like bleeding cuts".

BUT MORPURGO WAS lucky from an early age. He had a wonderful mother, an actress - and a good one, too: "RADA, Stratford-upon-Avon and all that".

Stories became the vital link between herself and her son. Most evenings she would come and sit on his bed and read stories to him - Aesop's Fables, Masefield, Belloc, Kipling and Edward Lear's Jumblies. Often his mother would find her son rocking his bed and chanting "Zanzibar! Zanzibar! Marzipan! Zanzibar!" The rhythms of Morpurgo's storytelling had begun.

Another of his childhood favourites was Treasure Island. It is the one novel Morpurgo would love to have written himself, and to this day he still believes Robert Louis Stevenson to have been "one of the greatest of writers".

Another writer he talks a lot about was a great neighbour and friend. "I was lucky because I lived near Ted Hughes. We fished the same river, the River Torridge, the very one that had also inspired Henry Williamson to write about Tarka the otter."

Hughes and Morpurgo met in the evening, sipping Burgundy and talking books and poetry.

"Ted would give me his manuscripts for my approval!" Morpurgo impishly reminisces, adding, "And I would give him mine."

It was not, however, Morpurgo's first encounter with the brilliance of Hughes.

As a young teacher in the 1970s, Morpurgo's life - and the lives of the children he taught - was revolutionised by Ted Hughes's poetry programmes for BBC School Radio, later published as Poetry in the Making, encouraging young people to think and write for themselves.

"Here was a famous poet telling us 'you can do it', and that we could find our own voice."

Around this time too, Morpurgo's life dramatically altered in a practical way.

His wife Clare (daughter of Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books) suggested they move to Devon. They bought a house and farm in Iddesleigh, and set up an educational charity, Farms for City Children. There are now several farms, and more than 60,000 children have been able to encounter rural life at first hand in Gloucestershire, Wales and in Vermont.

By now, living with his wife and his family in a small rural community, Morpurgo was not only enriching himself as a person but also beginning to grow further as a writer.

Then another fortuitous thing happened. It was 1982 and Michael Morpurgo had just written War Horse, the story of a yearling colt's terrifying adventures on the Western Front in the first World War. The novel had been shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. A limousine came to collect him, as it was widely expected that he would win.

"When I didn't, I had to go back home on the tube," he laughs.

Next day back on the farm, a bit downcast and milking cows, he received a call. It was Ted Hughes. They went out for the afternoon and the poet said, "I heard about the prize last night. Don't worry about that nonsense. You've written a fine book and you'll write another."

"From then on, I felt lucky. I had a voice of my own, a storytelling voice, a writer's voice," Morpurgo explained, still obviously moved by the force of Hughes's encouragement.

He speaks highly, too, of Sean Rafferty, another poet, and "one of the best-read men" he has ever met, who lived close by.

Suddenly Morpurgo felt he was a writer among writers in a place conducive to story-making. And the stories were flowing: War Horse ("still my wife's favourite story, which is disappointing as it was written 25 years ago!"), King of the Cloud Forests, Waiting for Anya, The White Horse of Zennor and All Around the Year, a book he collaborated on with Ted Hughes.

AMONG OTHER THINGS, he is currently working on a re-telling of Aesop's fables and the Grimms' Hansel and Gretel, which he talks passionately about.

And Michael Morpurgo is also very proud that just before Ted Hughes died, they both had established the Children's Laureate. All of the Laureates to date - Quentin Blake, Anne Fine, Morpurgo himself and currently Jacqueline Wilson, are great defenders of the joys of storytelling for children over target-driven literacy and of the need to defend standards when writing for young audiences.

They are issues which Morpurgo has long been passionate about, and also why he was in Dublin to speak at an event organised by the Arts Council's Critical Voices series and Children's Books Ireland.

Morpurgo is angered by the perception among many adult readers that writing for children is something to be belittled. He has even been saddened to be asked by children themselves, "Do you just write for children?"

For Morpurgo there is quite simply good writing and bad. "You do not write for a lesser audience. You write!"

In one of his finest stories, I Believe in Unicorns (a story also transformed into a film, a play, an opera and a novella), Morpurgo writes about a child, a reluctant reader, whose encounter with a magical storyteller makes him believe in unicorns and stories for the rest of his life. As our interview draws to a close, I become convinced that Morpurgo is in fact that magical storyteller, powerful enough to make me, too, believe in unicorns.

Singing for Mrs Pettigrew, a story-maker's journey, by Michael Morpurgo is published by Walker Books, £12.99 in UK. Enda Wyley is a poet. Her novel for children, Timothy Finn and the Mysterious Notebook, will be published by O'Brien Press in 2007