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When Patrice Lawrence got the call asking her to become the UK’s next children’s laureate, her first response was disbelief. “I was in absolute shock,” she says, laughing. She is only just beginning to process what it means to join a lineage that includes Jacqueline Wilson, Quentin Blake, Michael Rosen, Julia Donaldson, Malorie Blackman and, most recently, Frank Cottrell-Boyce.
“So many people who’ve gone before have had such an influence on my life,” she says. “Without Jacqueline Wilson, I wouldn’t write the kind of books that I do. She was such a trailblazer in social realism for children. And Malorie … well, Malorie only needs one name.”
Despite her modesty, the 59-year-old fits right into the lineup. The acclaimed author of young adult books including Orangeboy, Indigo Donut, Needle, and the picture book Is That Your Mama?, she has won some of children’s literature’s biggest honours, including the Waterstones children’s book prize and the inaugural children’s and young adult category of the Jhalak prize.
Cottrell-Boyce, the outgoing laureate, has spent his two years in the role highlighting the importance of reading for pleasure in transforming children’s outcomes, in tandem with the UK’s National Year of Reading. Lawrence plans to build on his work, focusing on the role of reading in what she sees as an increasingly socially divided Britain.
“We’re such a fractured society at the moment,” she says. “Personally, for the first time in a long while, as a Black person and the child of immigrants, I’ve felt unsafe. And if I feel that as an adult, how on earth do some children feel?” For Lawrence, books can be a vehicle to foster a sense of belonging. She compares shared reading to standing in a crowd when a favourite song comes on. “Everybody sings together and everybody has that moment of unity,” she says. “I want to create that through stories.”
Lawrence spent years working in organisations focused on children’s rights and social justice before becoming a children’s author, publishing her breakthrough YA novel Orangeboy in 2016, aged 49. She has a practical vision for her laureateship. “To change policy you need evidence”, she says. “We say stories work, let’s show how they work.” She hopes to gather research from children in care, refugee families and the children of prisoners to demonstrate how books change lives.
Her own life offers compelling evidence of literature’s impact. Lawrence was born in 1967 to Trinidadian parents who had both travelled to Britain to train as nurses. Her parents separated before she was born, and she spent the first four years of her life privately fostered by a white working-class family in Brighton while her mother completed her training – a relatively common practice at the time.
Her foster mother signed her up to the library as soon as she was old enough and taught her to read before she started school. When she later moved back in with her mother, there were books everywhere. Her father, too, lived among shelves overflowing with them. “Books were just part of my life,” she says.
What she still couldn’t imagine, however, was becoming a children’s author herself. She read Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome and Tolkien, and simply assumed that children’s literature could not be written by people who looked like her.
“I presumed children’s books were written by people who were white and dead,” she says matter-of-factly. “As I was neither, it genuinely wasn’t even a possibility in my consciousness.”
Lawrence says that until her mid-30s, every story she wrote featured white characters. “I had so absorbed the idea that children like me didn’t deserve to be in books and adults like me couldn’t be authors that I didn’t even question it,” she tells me.
It was only when she saw the 1999 BBC adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s Pig-Heart Boy that her perception shifted. “It was life-changing,” she says. “For the first time I realised you could write about Black British people – she really helped me find my voice.”
Blackman became both mentor and friend. “She’s a role model to me as well as an author,” she says. “I always describe myself as the poor man’s Malorie!”
Lawrence published her debut book, Granny Ting Ting, in 2009, but it was Orangeboy, her YA novel about a teenage boy in Hackney whose life unravels after a first date draws him into gang violence, which brought her to prominence: it won both the Waterstones children’s book prize for older children and the Bookseller YA book prize, and was shortlisted for the Costa Children’s book award. Her acclaimed follow-up, Indigo Donut, cemented her reputation.
As laureate, she hopes children from every background will recognise themselves in her appointment – not just Black children, but children from working-class families, fostered children and anyone whose family lives don’t fit traditional narratives.
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When she visits schools to talk about novels such as Needle and Indigo Donut, both of which feature children in foster care, pupils invariably wait behind afterwards to tell her their own stories. “There will always be children, Black or white, who come up and talk to me about their experiences,” she says.
Similarly, her 2023 picture book Is That Your Mama?, which grew out of the experience of strangers questioning whether her mixed-raced son was really her child, continues to strike a chord. “So many people come up to me and talk to me about that book and say ‘oh that happens to me, too’”, she says. “I know that people feel validated and seen by the books I write, which is so important.”
This year, the government launched the National Year of Reading to combat a crisis in literacy among children: last year, only one in three eight- to 18-year‑olds reported enjoying reading in their spare time – a 36% drop in two decades and the lowest level on record, according to the National Literacy Trust.
It’s a multifaceted problem, and Lawrence is careful to remain nuanced in her prognosis. Placing the blame solely on parents, she warns, risks distracting from deeper structural inequalities: the fact that books are expensive, libraries are closing, and families are under immense financial pressure. “We’re living in a really difficult society at the moment,” she says. “People are struggling with the cost of living, with work, with everything else.”
She also argues that, in schools, reading has become too closely associated with assessment. “It’s often about reading this book so you can identify the theme and write the essay,” she says. “Reading becomes functional. The pleasure side is forgotten, that’s what we need more of.”
However, Lawrence is noticeably less pessimistic about children’s reading habits than some of the headlines. Partly, she says, that’s because she sees what many adults don’t. Almost every week she travels the country visiting schools, libraries and children’s book awards run by librarians and volunteers. Whether in Hull, Penrith, Salford or London, she encounters children who treat authors “like rock stars”.
“I walk into these events after horrible train journeys feeling exhausted,” she says. “Then I meet all these young people who are passionate about books. It completely lifts my heart.”
“There are amazing things happening already,” she continues. “I spend my life surrounded by children who are obsessed with books – I just don’t think people always hear about them.”
