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A World Book Day question: which children’s author is name-checked in Stormzy’s song Superheroes (and appears in the video for Mel Made Me Do It) and Tinie Tempah’s Written in the Stars? The answer, as a generation of readers will know, is former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman. Her groundbreaking novel, Noughts & Crosses, turns 25 this year.
Set in a dystopian Britain (Albion), in which racial hierarchies are reversed, this story of star-crossed lovers was one of the first young adult novels to tackle racism and class directly in the UK. It was written in response to the death of Stephen Lawrence; 20 years later, Endgame, the last in the series, was finished as the world witnessed the murder of George Floyd. Noughts & Crosses was voted one of the UK’s all-time favourite books, and has been adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company and for TV by the BBC, with a cameo from Stormzy.
The rapper writes in a new anniversary introduction that reading Noughts & Crosses “was the first time that words on a page had gripped me in the same way that a film or TV series had”. This is exactly the message behind the government-backed National Year of Reading campaign, for which Blackman is an ambassador. Of course, young people now have more screens to keep them from books. Just last month research from the National Literacy Trust showed that fewer than one in 10 boys aged 14 to 16 in the UK read daily.
Toni Morrison said: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Blackman started writing after finding only one children’s book with a Black protagonist in a London bookshop in the 1980s.
The situation isn’t much better today. In fact, after a flurry of commissioning in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, representation has taken an alarming backward step in the past two years. A recent report by Inclusive Books for Children revealed a “precipitous decline”: out of 2,721 books published for ages nine and under in 2024, only 51 featured a Black main character, a drop by more than a fifth from 2023. It is the same picture across publishing, where the post-2020 promises have failed to result in a broader range.
In another landmark, 50 years ago Margaret Busby became Britain’s first Black female publisher. Aged 20, she co-founded Allison and Busby, which championed writers including CLR James and Buchi Emecheta. Following in her footsteps, Stormzy launched the publishing imprint #Merky Books to “own – and change – the mainstream” in 2018. As Bernardine Evaristo, the first Black woman and first British Black writer to win the Booker prize (controversially shared with Margaret Atwood) in 2019 argues: “Top-down inclusion and true integration, from the boardroom to the basement, is the only way to go.”
In a climate of increased hostility towards minorities it is more important than ever that all children see themselves reflected in the pages of a book. “Many stories matter,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in her Ted talk The Danger of a Single Story. “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanise.” Diversity must not be a publishing trend. Only lasting change will ensure that today’s young readers have a Noughts & Crosses of their own.
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