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A new national festival supported by the Prince of Wales hopes to revive the art of family storytelling. Jasper Rees reports, and gets the views of some notable storytellers

In the beginning was the spoken word. Before stories had readers, they had listeners. From Homer through Aesop to Chaucer, early literature got by perfectly well without the printing press and universal literacy. But the oral tradition, typified more recently by the classic image of families gathered eagerly round to hear the newest serial from Dickens, has been eroding for half a century.

That erosion is now accelerating. Thanks to television, video games, the computer and other electronic impediments, fewer parents read stories to their children than ever before. If you take the apocalyptic view, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. The long-term impact of an early childhood without bedtime stories, according to leading children’s writers, cannot be overstated.”If you don’t get that foundation stone and you then go to school to learn literacy, it’s what puts children at a huge disadvantage, probably for the rest of their life,” argues Michael Morpurgo, whose book War Horse is now reaching a new generation of theatre-goers at the National Theatre.

One of the jobs of a successful children’s writer is to bang the drum for the written word in schools. None recognise this more than ex-teacher Eoin Colfer, whose Artemis Fowl books this month branched out into the graphic novel. “Most teachers recognise the teaching power of a good story,” he says. “I taught all sorts of lessons, especially history and geography. They learn by accident. Which is always the best way.”

Colfer’s tactic for engaging attention is to “put the book aside and try to engage the kids with my own voice and antics”. G?P Taylor, author of Shadowmancer and its sequels, goes one step further during his visits each autumn to up to 250 schools.Rather than promote his own books, he promotes storytelling as a whole, primarily through ghost stories.

“The oral element is fundamentally the most important part,” he says. “Somehow something magical happens between the words leaving my lips and reaching the ears of the hearer which suspends disbelief.” But it can’t be left entirely to writers to schlep up and down the country to breathe life into a dying art. StoryQuest, a national festival of storytelling, is designed to help put the art of narrative back into the life of the nation.

Under the aegis of the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts, it will run a month-long promotion encouraging families and teachers to hymn the praises of books, storytelling and conversation.

It kicks off on Friday with Family Storytelling Day, during which participants are urged to switch off the television, retrieve heirlooms and photo albums and use them to tell stories to their own family. This sets the tone for the rest of the month. True to the demotic nature of the oral tradition, rather than being organised from on high, people are invited to set up their own events in arts venues throughout the country.

As Morpurgo argues, the first responsibility for inculcating a love of literature falls to mothers and fathers. “It’s a crying shame in a country as wealthy as ours that millions of children don’t read. It’s associated with middle-class learning. Books are not just for clever dicks. Stories belong to us all. The only people who can get that over are the parents.”

Click here for more from Eoiin Colfer, G P Taylor, Michael Morpurgo and others on StoryQuest.