Then and Now - a reflection by Sita Brahmachari
We asked award-winning author Sita Brahmachari to reflect on the differences in the industry she sees from when she started to now. Read on for her answer.
When did your first book come out and what do you see as the difference in the UK children’s book world from then vs now?
This is a big question. It deserves a full answer.
Artichoke Hearts was published in 2011. I was 40 years old, and it was my debut novel. I had no expectations of getting it published or any thought of it winning awards. I was amazed when I was offered a publishing contract with Macmillan Children’s Books. Shortly after the story won the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize and was chosen as one of the top 50 Books celebrating diversity since the 1950’s by The Guardian. The whole experience was both amazing and confusing.
In writing Artichoke Hearts I was writing a quiet story about grief and loss in a family whose roots and branches hail from India, Poland and Britain. The heroine Mira is mixed heritage, just as I am and her friends at school also hold within them migratory and refugee stories from around the globe. So, for Mira’s first love to be Jide Jackson, a refugee survivor from Rwanda, seemed both sweet and true to life to me. Writing about a British teenager growing up today it did not occur to me that I was doing anything to break the mould. This is our world; it was like breathing to me to populate it with who we are.
Before I began writing novels I had worked in theatre for over twenty years for companies like The Royal Court Theatre, Talawa and Tamasha Theatre companies committed to reflect the talents of our diverse population. I see writing novels as a continuation of that storytelling work to bring the voices of children and young people, so seldom seen in plays to the centre of the stage, and now I was drawn to the page.
This passion to explore what blocks of frees a voice grew out of my own feeling growing up that there was so little representation of families like my own in the stories that I read. The negative impact on the child of feeling that their culture, heritage, history, and family stories are ‘othered’ recurs in my work. It was the subject of my research for my MA dissertation in Arts Education (Central School of Speech and Drama, 1999).
When I had my own children, I was shocked to find how little representation of mixed heritage, Asian and Black characterisation of children were to be found in stories for children. In 2015 I was honoured to be invited to take up the role of Writer in Residence at Book Trust to raise awareness and to champion many different aspects of diversity in Children’s Books centred around representation.
Book Trust and organisations like Inclusive Minds, Amnesty, Empathy Lab and The Campaign for Literacy in Education, National Literacy Trust and Reading Agency have done extensive research and campaigning to move towards a time that the books on offer to all children hold a mirror up to who we are today as well as opening windows onto our histories and heritages to spark every child’s empathy and imagination. The process is ongoing and infrastructural.
I could not have dreamed in 2011 that I would have written so many stories for children and young adults by now, and I still today am overjoyed when I meet young people and writers some of whom have now grown up to be teachers and editors… who say my stories made a difference to them. In 2021 Sim Kaur Sandhu was the editor of the 10-year anniversary edition of Artichoke Hearts. She has been the first British South Asian editor I have worked with. She said ‘I was at school when I first read Artichoke Hearts. It was the first time I have ever read a character I could really identify with as a brown girl. Coming back to Mira and her brilliant Nana as an editor, felt like coming home.’
When I started out there were not so many people for me to see whose footsteps I was walking in although I had more examples from youth theatre. Jamila Gavin with ‘Coram Boy’ was an inspiration to me and helped me see that I might be able to become a writer for children and young people. David Almond too with ‘My Name is Mina’ made me see that I could write a story inspired by characters from my heritage. There are so many more writers today for children like my own family to be inspired by but the inequalities in society mean that the world of children’s books is still very far off being able to offer all our children a sense that they and their stories truly belong.
The world of children’s and young adult books looks so different today that in 2011 and so does the world. In Tender Earth When Laila, Mira’s little sister (the baby in Artichoke Hearts) starts secondary school) the fissures of this world, impacts of social media, racism and inequalities come to impact more on all the children’s lives.
There has been a communal movement from across the sector and acknowledgement for a pressing need for change that so many people in the industry have contributed to. Today I have many more friends and colleagues of British South Asian heritage in the children’s book world publishing stories and having their work championed now in different mediums. It has always been integral to my work to mentor and support and keep the ladder heading for the sky. In this sea-changed reactionary social media age, so vastly different from when Mira was a trailblazer in having a mobile phone in year 7 at school, we need all our nuanced voices to tell the stories that children need, dream of and deserve.
(Photo 1 - My role model -Jamila Gavin photo, 2011 at Federation of Children’s Book Group Conference.)
Sita Brahmachari is an internationally award-winning author of many highly acclaimed intergenerational novels, novellas, short stories and plays for children and young adults. Her stories to date are bookended by her debut novel Artichoke Hearts, 2011which won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and her Yoto Carnegie Shortlisted Young Adult novel When Shadows Fall, 2023.
Follow her on Threads: @sita.brahmachari and Instagram: @sita.brahmachari
