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3 hours ago
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In 2017 there was outrage when the Carnegie medal, the UK’s oldest and most prestigious children’s literature prize, had no minority ethnic authors on its longlist, despite nominations for Noughts & Crosses author Malorie Blackman and Patrice Lawrence for her widely acclaimed young adult novel Orangeboy. At that point, no writer of colour had ever won. Nearly a decade later, Lawrence has become the UK’s 14th children’s laureate.
“I wanted to write lovely young men of colour,” Lawrence has said of Orangeboy, which tells the story of 16-year-old Marlon, who finds himself caught up in an underworld of drugs and violence. “I wanted to explore what makes lovely people do not very nice things.” Although dealing with gang culture rather than internet radicalisation, Orangeboy speaks to current anxieties surrounding boys growing up, captured in the award-winning TV series Adolescence. Toxic teenage masculinity is also the subject of a debut play, Physical Education, that opened in Swansea last week.
Lawrence, who spent the first four years of her life fostered by a white family, has promised to put the most vulnerable children at the heart of her two-year tenure. The crisis of boyhood and reading make her appointment well-suited to the moment. Statistics show that teenage boys are the least likely to read for pleasure.
Lawrence cites Blackman and Jacqueline Wilson (author of the Tracy Beaker novels and The Illustrated Mum) as inspirations. Both are former children’s laureates. Blackman and Lawrence have spoken of a lack of black authors and characters in children’s fiction, while Wilson observed the absence of books about working-class families. Her novels were dubbed “grit lit” and worse. Such snobbery now seems as outdated as lashings of ginger beer. Blended families, bullying, mental health and teenage relationships – Lawrence has taken up the baton in reflecting the very real challenges that children face today. Grief and fear are part of many children’s lives, whatever background they come from.
Wizards, magical creatures and myths help spark young imaginations. Lawrence can do that too, as her fantasy adventure series The Elemental Detectives, set in a mythical 17th-century London, proves. But social realism also has an important place on children’s bookshelves. Orangeboy is a 21st-century Oliver Twist. Dickens and Lawrence set out to tell the truth about disadvantaged young people on the streets of London. Children, like adults, turn to fiction to help make sense of their reality, particularly in troubling times.
The outgoing children’s laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, has campaigned on the importance of shared early reading. Engaging teenage boys is an even greater challenge. While diversity in publishing is finally improving, especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter, representation in children’s books has declined again in the past few years. At a time of great social division and fear, Lawrence is an ideal successor.
Social media and time-strapped parents are not solely to blame for the reading crisis. Young people will only be lured from their screens by great storytelling and by seeing themselves reflected in the pages of a book. As Lawrence writes in the preface to a new 10th anniversary edition of Orangeboy: “I hope that I’ve encouraged children and young people who may never have felt seen to understand that their lives and their stories are valued and important.” Now she has a bigger platform from which to reach young readers.
