Malorie Blackman

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."

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.

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.

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.

Malorie Blackman OBE has a long connection with City Lit as a former student attending diverse courses since the late 1980s.

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.

Blackman's award-winning Noughts & Crosses series (beginning in 2001), exploring love, racism, and violence, is set in a fictional alternative Britain.

Noughts & Crosses was No. 61 on the Big Read list, a 2003 BBC survey to find "The Nation's Best-Loved Book".

Noughts and Crosses later became available in the US, published under the title Black & White (Simon & Schuster Publishers, 2005).

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".

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.

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.

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).

In 2019, City Lit announced the Malorie Blackman OBE 'Unheard Voices' Creative Writing Scholarships.

City Lit provide three annual awards worth up to £1000 each to fund study within the City Lit Creative Writing department.

Blackman is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby) with a letter written to her daughter.