Malorie Blackman
| Malorie Blackmann | |
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| Born | Oneta Malorie Blackmann 8 February 1962 Clapham, London, England |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | British |
| Genre | Children's literature, science fiction, mystery, thriller and horror; poetry |
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Malorie Blackman, OBE (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. Her critically and popularly acclaimed Noughts and Crosses series uses the setting of a fictional dystopia to explore racism.
Malorie Blackman was born on 8 February 1962 . Her parents are both from Barbados. While at school, she wanted to be an English teacher, but 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 married her husband Neil in the 1990s and their daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1995. Blackman has described herself, "I'm just Malorie Blackman, a black woman writer." Blackman's first book was Not So Stupid, which was a collection of horror and science fiction stories for young adults, published in November 1990. Ever since she has written more than sixty children's books, including novels and short story collections, and also television scripts and a stage play.
Her work has won over 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 over fifteen 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 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 were never 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 why the Noughts & Crosses series was not, for a long time, 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 is now available in the US published under the title Black & White (Simon & Schuster Publishers, 2005).
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