wWhen Patrice Lawrence got the call to become Britain’s next Children’s Laureate, her first reaction was disbelief. “I was absolutely shocked,” she says, laughing. She’s just beginning to process what it means to join a lineage that includes Jacqueline Wilson, Quentin Blake, Michael Rosen, Julia Donaldson, Mallory Blackman and, most recently, Frank Cottrell-Boyce.
“So many of the people who have gone before have had such an impact on my life,” she says. “Without Jacqueline Wilson, I wouldn’t be writing the kind of books I do. She was a pioneer in social realism for children. And Mallory… well, Mallory just needs a name.”
Despite her modesty, the 59-year-old fits perfectly 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 the biggest honors in children’s literature, including the Waterstones Children’s Book Awards and the inaugural Children’s and Young Adult categories of the Glimpse Awards.
Outgoing award winner Cottrell-Boyce has spent her two years highlighting the importance of reading for pleasure in transforming children’s outcomes, in line with the UK’s National Reading Year. Lawrence plans to further her work, focusing on the role of reading in what she sees as an increasingly socially divided Britain.
“We are a fractured society right now,” she says. “Personally, for the first time in a long time, as a black person and a child of immigrants, I have felt unsafe. And if I feel that way as an adult, how do some kids feel?” For Lawrence, books can be a medium to foster a sense of belonging. She compares shared reading to standing in a crowd as a favorite song plays. “Everyone sings together and everyone has that moment of unity,” she says. “I want to create that through stories.”
Lawrence spent Before becoming a children’s author she worked for several years in organizations focused on children’s rights and social justice, publishing her successful YA novel Orangeboy in 2016 at the age of 49. He has a practical approach to becoming an award winner. “To change policy you need evidence,” she says. “We say stories work, let’s show how they work.” She hopes to draw on research from children in care, refugee families and prisoners to demonstrate how books change lives.
His own life offers compelling evidence of the influence of literature. Lawrence was born in 1967 to Trinidadian parents who traveled to Britain to train as nurses. Her parents separated before she was born, and she spent the first four years of her life being raised privately by a white working-class family in Brighton, while her mother completed her training – a relatively common practice at the time.
As she grew up, her foster mother enrolled her in the library and taught her to read before she started school. Later when she came back with her mother, there were books everywhere. His father also lived among shelves full of them. “Books were a part of my life,” she says.
However, she still could not imagine becoming a children’s author herself. He read Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome, and Tolkien and simply assumed that children’s literature couldn’t be written by people who looked like him.
“I assumed children’s books were written by people who were white and dead,” she says matter-of-factly. “Since I was neither of those, it wasn’t really even a possibility in my consciousness.”
Lawrence says that until his mid-30s, every story he wrote had white characters. “I had so internalized this idea that kids like me didn’t deserve to be in books and adults like me couldn’t be writers, that I didn’t even question it,” she tells me.
It was only when he saw the BBC adaptation of Mallory Blackman’s Pig-Hearted Boy in 1999 that his perception changed. “It was life-changing,” she says. “It was the first time I realized you could write about black British people – it really helped me find my voice.”
Blackman became both mentor and friend. “She’s a role model for me as well as a writer,” she says. “I always describe myself as the poor man’s Malory!”
Lawrence published her first 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 her into gang violence, that brought her to prominence: it Won both the Waterstones Children’s Book Award and the Bookseller YA Book Award for Older Children, and was shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Book Award. His acclaimed follow-up, Indigo Donut, cemented his reputation.
As award winners, she hopes that children from every background will recognize themselves in her appointment – not just black children, but children from working-class families, foster children, and all those whose family lives do not fit traditional narratives.
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When she visits schools to talk about novels like The Needle and Indigo Donut, both of which feature children in foster care, students always wait for her to tell their stories. “There will always be kids, black or white, who come up to me and talk to me about their experiences,” she says.
Similarly, in her 2023 picture book Is That Your Mama?, The question that stems from this experience of strangers wondering whether her mixed-race son is actually her child continues to this day. “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 in the books I write, which is very important.”
This year the government launched national year of reading To tackle the literacy crisis in children: Last year, according to the National Literacy Trust, 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.
This is a multidimensional problem, and Lawrence is careful to maintain precision in his predictions. Placing the blame solely on parents, she warns, risks distracting attention from deeper structural inequities: the fact that books are expensive, libraries are closing, and families are under extreme financial pressure. “We live in a really tough society right now,” she says. “People are struggling with cost of living, work and everything else.”
He also argues that, in schools, reading has become too closely linked with assessment. “It’s often about reading the book so you can identify the topic and write the essay,” she says. “Reading becomes functional. The pleasure side gets forgotten, we need more of it.”
However, Lawrence is less pessimistic about children’s reading habits than some headlines. Partly, she says, that’s because she sees what many adults don’t see. Almost every week she travels around the country to visit schools, libraries and children’s book awards run by librarians and volunteers. Whether in Hull, Penrith, Salford or London, he encounters kids who treat writers “like rock stars”.
“I go to these events feeling exhausted after horrible train journeys,” she says. “Then I meet all these young people who are also passionate about books. It completely warms my heart.”
“Amazing things are already happening there,” she adds. “I spend my life surrounded by kids who are passionate about books – I don’t think people always hear about them.”
