The children’s author answers questions from readers, friends and writers on losing his son Eddie, surviving Covid, who he’d invite to his perfect birthday dinner and where he goes for inspiration

Whether you know him from reading his classic picture book We’re Going on A Bear Hunt as a child, from his viral YouTube videos or his tireless support for children’s literacy and the NHS, Michael Rosen has been a household name in the UK for decades. As he turns 80, we gave his peers and Guardian readers the opportunity to put to him the questions they’ve always wanted to ask.

Which do you prefer, asking or answering questions? Roger McGough, poet
Probably asking. I always worry if I’m answering questions I’m being boring. It feels quite exciting if you ask questions. And, as Roger knows, the moment you pick up a pen and start to write, you’re actually asking questions. You’re saying: “What’s the next word? What’s the next phrase? Why am I writing in this shape? Why am I writing in this tone of voice?”

Colm Tóibín, Robert Macfarlane, Elif Shafak, Michael Rosen and more share the novels, poetry and memoirs that make the perfect gift

I love giving books as presents. I rarely give anything else. I strongly approve of the Icelandic tradition of the Jólabókaflóðið (Yule book flood), whereby books are given (and, crucially, read) on Christmas Eve. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is the one I’ve given more often than any other; so much so that I keep a stack of four or five to hand, ready to give at Christmas or any other time of the year. It’s a slender masterpiece – a meditation on Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the Cairngorm mountains, which was written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. It’s “about the Cairngorms” in the sense that Mrs Dalloway is “about London”; which is to say, it is both intensely engaged with its specific setting, and gyring outwards to vaster questions of knowledge, existence and – a word Shepherd uses sparingly but tellingly – love.

An Asian Scrooge, a break-dancing Bob Cratchit and a musical bear – new versions of classics keep stories alive

Not even the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come could have foreseen a Bollywood-inspired film or a hip-hop fantasy performance of A Christmas Carol. But these are the latest takes on Dickens’s much-adapted classic: Christmas Karma from Gurinder Chadha, the Bend It Like Beckham director, brings us Mr Sood, a Ugandan Asian refugee (played by Kunal Nayyar), who came to Britain in 1972; Ebony Scrooge transforms the old miser into a Dominican fashion diva at the recently opened Sadler’s Wells East, London.

We may think of Scrooge McDuck and the Muppets, but there was deep moral seriousness behind A Christmas Carol. Dickens had intended to write a political pamphlet entitled An Appeal on Behalf of the Poor Man’s Child, but instead decided to bury “the ghost of an idea” in a festive story. A Christmas Carol was written in six weeks and published on 19 December 1843, when Dickens was just 31. By Christmas Eve it had sold all 6,000 copies. By February 1844 there had been eight stage adaptations.