Ramdarshan Bold, Melanie. Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom. Palgrave Pivot, 2019. 157 pages. ISBN 9783030105211.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: When Melanie Ramdarshan Bold's book was first published, George Floyd was still alive, and the word 'pandemic' was something associated with the global 1918 flu outbreak.The UK painted itself publicly as a modern, multiracial nation, something perhaps best highlighted in the Danny Boyle-directed opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics, which featured a model of the Empire Windrush and its Black Caribbean passengers who had travelled to Britain to fill worker shortages after World War II.The most-published Black British children's author to date, Malorie Blackman, had been made children's laureate 2013-2015, a position that gave her a national platform to raise issues about children and books in British society.However, there was a growing sense of unease about this depiction of a tolerant society.The Grenfell Tower fire (2017), which killed seventy-two people, many of whom were from racially minoritized communities, and the Windrush Scandal (first reported on in 2018) in which Black people who had lived in Britain since childhood were being detained and deported due to the British government's "Hostile Environment" policy, had both received considerable attention in the press.Cultural figures and literacy charities were becoming more vocal in their calls for children's books to reflect British society as well.Malorie Blackman's 2014 criticism that there weren't enough Black characters in children's books was reported with race-baiting headlines (such as Chris Green's for the Independent newspaper, "Children's Books are Too White, says Laureate"), but unlike in the US, there were few statistics available to back up Blackman's claim.The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), partly in response to concerns voiced by Blackman and other authors of colour, published their first Reflecting Realities report in 2018 which revealed that "Only 1% of the children's books published in the UK in 2017 had a BAME 1 1 Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic.This term, used in government statistics such as education reports, is now considered reductive and has not been used by CLPE in their Reflecting Realities reports since 2020.
Author: Karen Sands-OConnor
Institution: University of Sheffield
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4410122051