“I hate being labelled,” she says today, ensconced in the chic café at the top of Waterstone’s Piccadilly, where she’s requested hot water to mix with the cold remedy she’s determinedly sipping on. “Through my whole writing career it seems people have always been criticising me for not tackling racism. But things like even having black characters on covers when I first started was a bit of a political statement, because I’ve had more than one bookseller say to me ‘that book would sell better if you didn’t put black people on the cover’.”
Malorie Blackman is interviewed by Allison Flood at the Guardian about her book, Noughts and Crosses, which can perhaps be described kind of like Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes (the sociology classroom experiment) meets Romeo and Juliet. The Crosses have all the power and influence, and are brown; the Noughts have nothing, and aren’t. An interesting series, and a fascinating interview with an author who didn’t really want to write about racism, because, since she is black, it was kind of…expected.
