The Guardian view on Patrice Lawrence: a children’s laureate for our times | Editorial
The author of the bestselling young-adult novel Orangeboy is ideally suited to address the crisis of teenage masculinity and readingIn 2017 there was outrage when the Carnegie medal, the UK’s...
By Editorial · The Guardian Opinion
The author of the bestselling young-adult novel Orangeboy is ideally suited to address the crisis of teenage masculinity and reading In 2017 there was outrage when the Carnegie medal , the UK’s oldest and most prestigious children’s literature prize, had no minority ethnic authors on its longlist, despite nominations for Noughts & Crosses author Malorie Blackman and Patrice Lawrence for her widely acclaimed young adult novel Orangeboy. At that point, no writer of colour had ever won. Nearly a decade later, Lawrence has become the UK’s 14th children’s laureate. “I wanted to write lovely young men of colour,” Lawrence has said of Orangeboy, which tells the story of 16-year-old Marlon, who finds himself caught up in an underworld of drugs and violence. “I wanted to explore what makes lovely people do not very nice things.” Although dealing with gang culture rather than internet radicalisation, Orangeboy speaks to current anxieties surrounding boys growing up, captured in the award-winning TV series Adolescence . Toxic teenage masculinity is also the subject of a debut play, Physical Education , that opened in Swansea last week. Continue reading...