I personally, as a teenager, didn’t like books I felt were trying to preach to me… I did not believe in happy endings. I wanted to read books which reflected life as I thought I knew it. Malorie Blackman Read Quote
I think what we need, especially in publishing, is more commissioning editors and editors who are people of colour. Malorie Blackman Read Quote
We need more people working in the publishing industry itself who are people of colour. Malorie Blackman Read Quote
Any anxieties publishers have about putting a child on the front cover of a book who isn’t white is very old fashioned. Malorie Blackman Read Quote
I didn’t even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn’t afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local library reading as much as I could and getting out as many books as I could. Malorie Blackman Read Quote
I try to widen the horizons of every child I meet, and part of that is promoting diverse forms, be it graphic novels, stories told in a narrative voice, or more translated books, as well as more diverse writers and more diverse characters. Malorie Blackman Read Quote
Children will go with any story as long as it’s good, but white adults sometimes think that if a black child’s on the cover, it is perhaps not for them. Malorie Blackman Read Quote
What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens – I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature – using books themselves as a starting point. Malorie Blackman Read Quote
I think fan fiction is the way most writers start, and the same goes for music and design. Malorie Blackman Read Quote
History should belong to all of us, and it needs to include people from different cultural backgrounds. Otherwise, it risks becoming irrelevant to children, who could then become disenchanted with education. Malorie Blackman Read Quote
