Blackman is a British writer who held the position of Children’s Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She primarily writes literature and television drama for children and young adults and has used science fiction to explore social and ethical issues
1962
uk
British
Parents from Barbados
Blackman was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours.
In June 2013, Blackman was announced as the new Children’s Laureate, succeeding Julia Donaldson.
Her parents were both from Barbados and had come to Britain as part of the Windrush generation. Her father was a bus driver and her mother worked in a pyjama factory and at school. Malorie wanted to be an English teacher, but she grew up to become a systems programmer instead. She earned an HNC at Thames Polytechnic and is a graduate of the National Film and Television School.
Blackman’s first book was Not So Stupid!, a collection of horror and science fiction stories for young adults, published in November 1990. Since then, she has written more than 60 children’s books, including novels and short story collections, and also television scripts and a stage play.
Her work has won more than 15 awards. Blackman’s television scripts include episodes of the long running children’s drama Byker Grove as well as television adaptations of her novels Whizziwig and Pig-Heart Boy. She became the first person of colour writer to work on Doctor Who and her books have been translated into over 15 languages including Spanish, Welsh, German, Japanese, Chinese and French.
Blackman’s award-winning Noughts & Crosses series, exploring love, racism and violence, is set in a fictional dystopia. Explaining her choice of title, in a 2007 interview for the BBC’s Blast website, Blackman said that noughts and crosses is “one of those games that nobody ever plays after childhood, because nobody ever wins”. In an interview for The Times, Blackman said that before writing Noughts & Crosses, her protagonists’ ethnicities had never been central to the plots of her books. She has also said: “I wanted to show Black children just getting on with their lives, having adventures, and solving their dilemmas, like the characters in all the books I read as a child.”
Blackman eventually decided to address racism directly. She reused some details from her own experience, including an occasion when she needed a plaster and found they were designed to be inconspicuous only on white people’s skin. The Times interviewer Amanda Craig speculated about the delay for the Noughts & Crosses series to be published in the United States and wrote that though there was considerable interest, 9/11 killed off the possibility of publishing any book describing what might drive someone to become a terrorist. Noughts and Crosses is now available in the US published under the title Black & White (Simon & Schuster Publishers, 2005).
Noughts & Crosses was No. 61 on the Big Read list, a 2003 BBC survey to find “The Nation’s Best-Loved Book”, with more votes than A Tale of Two Cities, several Terry Pratchett novels and Lord of the Flies. It was dramatized for BBC One in March 2020, with a second series
Spouse – Neil Morrison
Children – Elizabeth Morrison
https://www.Blackheroesfoundation.org/people/malorie-Blackman/ accessed 23/06/2022
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-interview-author-malorie-Blackman-on-why-racism-now-is-as-bad-as-shes-known-it-vp7mq2kws accessed 23/06/2022
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/malorie-Blackman-twitter-alex-green-university-of-maryland-medical-centre-baltimore-b976102.html accessed 23/06/2022
https://coffeebookshelves.com/2013/12/16/10-things-you-never-knew-about-rock-star-author-malorie-Blackman/ accessed 23/06/2022
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/malorie-Blackman-quotes accessed 23/06/2022
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malorie_Blackman accessed 23/06/2022
