Malorie Blackman (born 8 February 1962) 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. She has used science fiction to explore social and ethical issues, for example, her Noughts and Crosses series uses the setting of a fictional alternative Britain to explore racism. Blackman has been the recipient of many honours for her work, including the 2022 PEN Pinter Prize.

Early life and education

Malorie Blackman was born on 8 February 1962 in Merton, London, and grew up in Lewisham, one of five siblings. Her parents were both from Barbados and had come to Britain as part of the "Windrush generation"; her father Joe was a bus driver and her mother Ruby worked in a pyjama factory. Blackman's father walked out on the family while she was younger, leaving her mother to single-handedly raise her and her siblings. 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. Since the 1980s, Blackman began attending various courses at City Lit adult education college, and in 2019, City Lit announced the Malorie Blackman OBE "Unheard Voices" Creative Writing Scholarships, providing three annual awards worth up to £1000 each to fund study within the City Lit Creative Writing department.

Career

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. She became the first person of colour writer to work on Doctor Who in 2018 (something almost accomplished by Robin Mukherjee 29 years earlier, during the run of the original series with the unmade Alixion). Blackman's award-winning Noughts & Crosses series (beginning in 2001), exploring love, racism, and violence, is set in a fictional alternative Britain. 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: "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 later became 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".

Recognition and awards

She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours. 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. Her books have been translated into more than 15 languages, including Spanish, Welsh, German, Japanese, Chinese and French. In June 2013, Blackman was announced as the new Children's Laureate, succeeding Julia Donaldson. Blackman helped set up the first UK Young Adult Literature Convention (YALC) during her time as Children's Laureate. In 2022, Blackman was chosen as winner of the PEN Pinter Prize, becoming the first author of children's and Young Adult books to receive the accolade. In her acceptance address at the British Library in October 2022, she named Dr Abduljalil Al-Singace as the International Writer of Courage with whom she would share the prize. In November 2023, the exhibition Malorie Blackman: The Power of Stories opened at the British Library (on show until 25 February 2024), celebrating and contextualizing her career. As described by Wallpaper magazine, it "shines a light on Blackman's journey as an author, while touching upon social issues represented in her novels.... The landmark exhibition ... is an open invitation to learn about the importance of media representation, and Black activism throughout the 1960s to 1980s."

Personal life

Malorie Blackman lives with her husband Neil and daughter Elizabeth in Kent, England. In her free time, she likes to play her piano, compose, play computer games and write poetry. She is the subject of a biography for children by Verna Wilkins. In March 2014, Blackman joined other prominent authors in supporting the Let Books Be Books campaign, which seeks to stop children's books being labelled as "for girls" or "for boys". In August 2014, Malorie Blackman was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue. Blackman is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby) with a letter written to her daughter. In 2019, Stormzy namechecked Blackman in his "Superheroes" song, and in 2022 she appeared in the "Mel Made Me Do It" promo video. Blackman's memoir Just Sayin': My Life In Words, published in 2022, was summed up by Patrice Lawrence as "a book about survival and success".

Works

Published books

Novels for young adults and children

Short stories for young adults

Novels for children

Short stories for children

Books for new readers

Picture books

Memoir

Television scripts

Stage plays

Radio scripts

Awards and nominations

Body of work

Novels

For Hacker (1995)

For A.N.T.I.D.O.T.E (1997)

For Pig-Heart Boy (1997)

For Tell Me No Lies (1999)

For Dead Gorgeous (2002)

For books in the Noughts & Crosses series

For Cloud Busting (2004)

For Crossfire (2019)

Television adaptations

For Pig-Heart Boy

For the Doctor Who episode "Rosa"