The Seagull Foundation for the Arts thanks Scholastic India for introducing us to Michael Heyman. The author visited The Seagull Books on the 28 November 2012 and read out nonsense literature to a house full of students from various schools.

Michael Heyman is a Professor of English at Berklee College of Music, where he teaches courses on children’s literature, music for children, poetics, multicultural literature, and performance poetry. He is a scholar and writer of literary nonsense and children’s literature and is the head editor of the groundbreaking and best-selling, The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (Penguin 2007), the first non-Western anthology of literary nonsense in translation in the world. Most recently, he edited This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse, published by Scholastic (2012). This anthology, to which he also contributed poems and stories, is a fully-illustrated anthology of nonsense for children. He continues to lecture in Europe, Asia, and North America on the world phenomenon of literary nonsense. Heyman’s articles and reviews have appeared in The Horn Book Magazine, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, The Five Owls, and Rod McGillis’s Children’s Literature and the Fin de Siécle (2003). He sat on the board of judges for The Lion and the Unicorn Award for North American Poetry from 2009-2012. His poems and short stories for children can be found in The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories (2005) and The Moustache Maharishi and other Unlikely Stories (Scholastic 2007) and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse. Heyman received his M.Phil from Oxford University in English Romantic Studies and his PhD in nonsense literature from University of Glasgow. He is an alumnus of Berklee, where he studied tenor saxophone. He also plays tabla, flute, guitar, and the diddlemaphone. (goodreads.com )