Malorie Blackman, the former children’s laureate, talks to Sian Cain about finishing her Noughts & Crosses series after 20 years, being namechecked by Stormzy and what inspired her to keep going through years of rejection
Malorie Blackman is used to staying hopeful. She remained so when she opened her 82nd rejection, before her first book, Not So Stupid!, was published in 1990. She did when she went into bookshops and found her books hidden away on the “multicultural” shelf; she’d simply pull them out and refile them under B. She felt it even when going into schools to a sea of white faces, where the librarian would say: “But you’re just writing for black children.”
The last 18 months, however, have been a significant challenge. Having been classed as extremely vulnerable due to a health condition, Blackman has been isolating for most of the pandemic – and it is clear that, as she puts it, she “loves a chat”. “It has been a very strange time,” she says. “I was getting government letters saying: ‘Don’t go out.’ I was trying to live as normal a life as possible, knowing full well it was extraordinary circumstances. But you do what you can, so I focused on my writing. Endgame was a good thing because it felt like I was doing something. I wasn’t saving lives, but I was doing something.”
