Malorie Blackman: ‘I didn’t read a book that featured a black protagonist until I was 21’

One of Britain’s most celebrated storytellers, whose YA novel Noughts and Crosses was adapted for TV this year, talks to Annabel Nugent about representation, race and how books encourage empathy

Malorie Blackman’s applauded Noughts and Crosses novels continue to be read as part of school curriculums across the country (Getty Images)

Once in a while, a book comes along that lingers long after a spine is first cracked. It consumes your every waking thought, burying itself so deep into your psyche that years later, on occasion, it will still emit some stray spark of memory. Sometimes that book will be a critically acclaimed classic like Jane Eyre or Crime and Punishment and often it will be something that you read in childhood – less lofty but equally powerful. Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman is one of those books for me.

The first novel of Blackman’s acclaimed series, of which there are now six, was written nearly two decades ago. Its story of star-crossed lovers though – a Romeo and Juliet-type story set in an alternative contemporary world in which Black people had been the colonisers and were now the ruling class dominant over white people – hasn’t aged. The book challenged perceptions of race in a way that hadn’t been done for a YA audience before.

“When I came to Noughts and Crosses,” says Blackman, “what I found really interesting was some of the assumptions that my white friends had about black people etcetera,” says Blackman. And so, she thought: “Now how do I turn it on its head?”

While it would be easy for her to ride the cultural cachet of Noughts and Crosses all the way to retirement, Blackman is not done educating the youth yet. This time, she is stepping out from behind her writing desk to serve as the co-curator of children’s books for LoveMyRead, a subscription service that delivers a newly published novel to your doorstep every month.

It has come at a welcome time. A pandemic, economic crises, adversarial politics, climate change, and social media’s enduring crusade to destroy self-esteem before it’s even had a chance to form; this year, all headlines are arriving at the same verdict: children today are up against it. Even if they are too busy to notice it themselves. “There’s a lot more competition for children’s time now. Obviously there’s TV and computer games, streaming and so forth. Books are having to compete,” says Blackman.

Together with LoveMyRead co-curator and fellow author Frank Cottrell Boyce, Blackman hopes to redress the dire state of representation in children’s books (LoveMyRead)

The author is particularly well suited to the role. Having “Children’s Laureate (2013-2015)” on your CV certainly helps, as does a 30-year career and a back catalogue of 60 published books, as well as television scripts (including an episode of Doctor Who) and theatre productions. And how many authors can count Stormzy as a huge fan? If there was anyone you could entrust with your child’s malleable mind, it is probably Blackman. Her outlook is rooted less in theory and more in the lived experience of reading as a child herself – its benefits, obviously, but most importantly its shortcomings.

“I didn’t read a book that featured a black protagonist until I was 21,” she says. It was a copy of The Colour Purple by Alice Walker that she had picked up at an independent Black bookshop in Islington. Growing up in Clapham, south London, Blackman “lived down my local” (library, not pub). But as a young girl, she didn’t see herself in stories, which sounds painful to remember how. “I knew that the world that I absolutely adored, the world of literature, I was invisible in and excluded from,” she says, adding: “It’s gotten better. We’re not there yet though.” 

Blackman says that young people should be able to find themselves on the page. “It’s so important that all children see all children in books not only so no one grows up believing that the world of literature is not for them,” says Blackman. “But also, because the power of books is about being able to walk in someone else’s shoes for a while and understand their point of view.” And if those shoes are always worn by white characters (or animals for that matter), that point of view is dangerously blinkered. It erases the point of books, what Blackman calls “the whole empathy thing”.

“The only way we progress as people and as society is really, really nurturing empathy between each other,” she emphasises. Books are an important way of doing that. “When you’re reading Noughts and Crosses, for example, you’re not just seeing the big things but all the racist microaggressions, the everyday occurrences that are incredibly wearing and affect your physical and mental health.”

Books can also afford children the distance of being “one step removed” to talk about difficult subjects. “Racism is one of those things where people – whether they’re black or white or whatever – take a step back and think, oh my god, do we really want to go there?” says Blackman. Books, she adds, present an opportunity to “go there” safely, allowing for discussion as opposed to just screaming at each other – as has become the favoured mode of debate in recent years. Books, then, are a sort-of anti-Twitter? Blackman laughs in agreement.

BBC’s adaptation of Blackman’s seminal novel divided critics and viewers (BBC/Mammoth Screen/Ilze Kitshoff)

Up until recently the author has managed to avoid becoming the target of a Twitter mob. The publication of Noughts and Crosses was early enough to bypass the social-media wringer but its TV adaptation, which aired on BBC in March earlier this year, gave critics a chance to dig their claws in. When it was released, Blackman’s phone lit up with a flurry of Twitter notifications from people claiming the series was peddling some kind of “anti-white” agenda; she was accused of pouring gasoline on the country’s already strained racial tensions.

Blackman addressed the accusations in her own tweet, short and to the point: “Go take a seat waaaay over there in the cold, dark and bitter haters’ corner.” Speaking about it now, she sees the criticism that she received as “a knee-jerk reaction” to a world that some adults were uncomfortable at seeing, one in which the social norms had been inverted. “Maybe they should sit and have a think about why that makes them uncomfortable,” she says. “And actually maybe that’s a good thing because outside of your comfort zone is where growth begins.”

For the author, the social function of books is a secondary concern. She is committed to the pleasure principle when it comes to reading, believing in reading literature to have a good time. “For children to reap all those benefits, they need to actually want to read,” she says laughing. It’s why she doesn’t believe in being snooty when it comes to books. Graphic novels are to be encouraged, she says, and children should not be berated when they fall short of weekly book quotas.

Blackman sounds like every child’s favourite teacher, less concerned with vocabulary lists than getting kids to pick up a book in the first place. Less Arthur Miller, more Hunger Games. Returning to Noughts and Crosses, you can easily see why it has aged as well as it has. Although now the book’s social message is what I can recall best, in my youth it had been simply a juicy romance to sink my teeth into at an age where I was too young to have my own. Wrapped up in an irresistible love story, though, was my first encounter with any sort of discourse surrounding racism – and I hadn’t even realised it. Blackman agrees. “Children and teens will devour all these different stories,” she says, “and as long as the story grabs them and it takes them on a really good adventure, they’ll read more and more and more.” She sounds hopeful. “And more.”

LoveMyRead children's book subscription is available to purchase here from £10.50 a month