Malorie Blackman

Which is part of the reason I started writing for children and young adults in the first place.

It's because you hope to get to people who are still making up their minds.

And it's not like I'm presenting answers in any of my books.

What I hope I'm doing is I'm asking questions and I'm also setting up something for debate, for conversation.

Let's talk about it.

It's like, you know, one of my favorite songs is Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.

And the whole thing of, you know, talk to me so you can see what's going on.

Let's have a conversation.

And let's have some nuance in the discussion.

Not everything is binary.

It doesn't have to be black or white.

You're either for me or you're against me.

But that seems to be the way the discourse is going at the moment.

well you know dystopia makes it sound like it could never happen and you know it's and it's funny because I never thought of it as a dystopian novel I thought of it as speculative fiction because it's flipping the world or flipping the western world but I find it fascinating that people call it dystopian because I must admit when I was writing it I never viewed it as such and for me it was just it was a kind of

playing around with the mirror image of our world and what it's like to have people make assumptions about you and assume things about you and feel they know you without having exchanged a word because of how you look.

or the deity you believe in or which gender you claim or whatever.

I find that really interesting that there's so much prejudging going on.

And I kind of wanted to address that in my books.

They are, they are.

And it was the first time I'd ever put my real experiences so overtly into one of my stories.