Malorie Blackman’s books shaped Britain’s youth

“When I was five or six,” writes Malorie Blackman in her 2022 autobiography, Just Sayin’, “Mum took me on my first trip to the local public library… I entered the world of books, never wanting to leave.”

Sixty years later, Merton-born Blackman has written over 70 novels for children and young adults, including Boys Don’t Cry, Hacker and, most famously, the Noughts & Crosses series. Many have been adapted for stage and screen – including the BAFTA award-winning TV series Pig-Heart Boy.

Blackman’s been instrumental in making children’s literature in Britain more representative, both in the characters she writes and in her advocacy work in real life.

Blackman grew up in a three-up, two-down house in the south-east suburb of Beckenham. Her parents were part of the Windrush Generation. They moved to Britain from Barbados after the Second World War (1939–1945) as part of a British government drive to rebuild the economy. “To do the jobs that white people didn’t want to do,” Blackman wrote in Just Sayin’.

Blackman found her reading spark as a young child. After that first trip to her local children’s library, she promised herself she’d read every single book in there. And she read them over and over.

But she was struck by the lack of representation in the stories she was reading: “I remember wondering why none of the books I read featured Black children in them. Not one of them featured a Black child like me.” It was only when she was studying for her A-levels, after secondary school, when she encountered her first Black character: William Shakespeare’s Othello.

“I know this spurred my writing as an adult, and that one of the major reasons I became an author was the dearth of Black protagonists in books.”

Blackman was 28 by the time her first book, Not So Stupid!, was published – after she’d been rejected by publishers more than 80 times. She was working as a computer programmer at the time, having studied computer science at Thames Polytechnic (now the University of Greenwich), and wrote her novels around her work.

In the years since, she’s become one of the country’s best-loved authors for children and young adults. Many of her fictional worlds dwell in the realms of horror, science fiction and mystery. But her characters, most of whom are Black, have the same experiences and anxieties her young readers can relate to. Her storylines explore friendships, family life, growing up, social division, self-confidence, identity and happiness.

In 2008, Blackman received an OBE (a high-ranking award given by the monarch) for her services to children’s literature. And in 2022, she also became the first children’s and young adult writer to be awarded the prestigious PEN Pinter Prize.

In 2001, Blackman’s groundbreaking novel Noughts & Crosses first hit the shelves. It’s a forbidden love story set in a racist, divided society where light-skinned, formerly enslaved “noughts” live as second-class citizens in a world run by dark-skinned “Crosses”. This was her 50th book – but the first to focus explicitly on racism and racialised identities.

“Noughts & Crosses wasn’t so much a book I wanted to write as a book I needed to write,” she reflected almost 20 years later. “It was born of… a need to deal with a number of events from my past, a desire to tackle the subject of racism head on, and the burning anger I felt regarding the death of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent mishandling of the police inquiry into his death.”

Stephen Lawrence was a Black teenager murdered in south-east London in 1993 in an unprovoked racist attack by a group of white men he didn’t know. A public inquiry led by retired judge William Macpherson was launched in 1997. In 1999, the Macpherson report was published. It concluded that the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into the killing had been “marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership”.

By looking at racism and class dynamics through what Blackman calls “a non-traditional lens”, she provides an alternative way for her readers to understand injustice and discrimination. The book won numerous awards and inspired a series of a further five novels, the final of which was published in 2021.

Among Blackman’s many fans is Croydon-born grime artist Stormzy. He says the Noughts & Crosses series “are still my favourite books of all time and showed me just how amazing storytelling could be”. A dream come true, then, that he starred in the BBC TV adaptation of the books in 2020.

Stormzy shouts her out in Superheroes, a track on his 2019 album, Heavy Is The Head: “I'm Malorie Blackman, the way I sell books / I jump on the stage, and then the world looks”. His publishing imprint #Merky Books also published Blackman’s autobiography in 2022.