Kensuke’s Kingdom

Michael Morpurgo was born in Hertfordshire, England during World War II. His parents divorced shortly after the war, and his mother remarried a man named Jack Morpurgo. Michael Morpurgo attended boarding school (which he disliked) as a child and briefly trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst before realizing a military life was not for him. He earned a degree from King’s College, London and began a career as a teacher. While working at a school in Kent, Morpurgo started to write stories for children. He and his wife Clare, who was also a teacher, established a charity to bring children from urban areas to spend time at farms around Great Britain, and the charity has continued to run after the Morpurgos’ retirement. Since the beginning of his career, Morpurgo has written over 130 books. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his writing.

Kensuke’s Kingdom takes place in the 1980s, more than 40 years after the end of World War II, but the war nevertheless has a tangible impact on the narrative. Kensuke’s career as a doctor is interrupted when he is called to work as a military medic for Japanese soldiers in the war, where he eventually becomes shipwrecked on the island after the Allied soldiers bomb his ship. (The Allied Powers were an international alliance that included the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.) Kensuke also loses his family in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The 1945 bombings, which were the world’s first exposure to the power of nuclear weapons, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Kensuke’s Kingdom is an entry in the genre of middle grade adventure novels that feature young boys surviving in the wilderness. A classic example of this type of novel is Gary Paulsen’s 1987 book Hatchet. Hatchet follows the 13-year-old Brian after he is stranded alone in the woods, much like the 12-year-old Michael finds himself shipwrecked on Kensuke’s island. The book Island of the Blue Dolphins, written by Scott O’Dell and published in 1960, is another young adult novel in which the protagonist is left alone on an island and must survive on her own for years. Other books that feature young protagonists who survive adventures in the wilderness are Jean Craighead George’s 1959 novel My Side of the Mountain and her 1972 novel Julie of the Wolves. Other classic castaway stories include Robinson Crusoe (1719), The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), and The Coral Island (1857).