The children’s laureate is responsible for promoting reading and children’s literature, as well as celebrating creativity and storytelling. For the newly appointed children’s laureate, Patrice Lawrence, belonging will sit at the centre of her work.
“I believe that we, as humans, are changed by stories. They connect us to different worlds, and they connect us to each other,” the author explained in the announcement of her tenure. “I will champion the power of books to make us feel like we belong, and shared stories as a tool for bringing people together. We are living in a divided world where many people feel isolated, we need this now, more than ever.”
Outgoing laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce spent his time pushing for every child to have access to books from the earliest years, regardless of where they grew up or what their family could afford. He treated reading as something owed to children rather than a bonus for the lucky ones.
Lawrence’s focus picks up that thread and turns it outward: if access to books is owed to every child, then feeling like a story belongs to you is part of that too. Denying a child that recognition, through a library shelf with nothing on it that reflects their life and the world around them, is its own form of exclusion.
This approach comes at time when belonging is keenly important. Recorded hate crime has risen again, and a party built substantially on hostility to immigration has spent the past year outpolling both the Conservatives and Labour. This is why Lawrence’s laureateship lands differently than it might have two, three or even ten years ago.
Lawrence is a writer for children and young people who is passionate about social justice. During her time as BookTrust’s writer in residence, she made clear the children she wrote for were those who’d arrived in Britain as refugees, who are growing up in foster or residential care, or who are navigating life with a parent in prison.
Lawrence knows what it feels like to be left out of the story. She has spoken about the absence of books that reflected her own experience growing up as a Black, working class foster child. The continuing dearth of books reflecting diverse experiences sat at the heart of her keynote at the School Libraries Association annual conference in June. In this speech she argued that representation in children’s literature is foundational to whether a child sees reading as something meant for them, rather than a nice thing other people get to have.
Her novels make the case better than any keynote could. Books like Orangeboy and Indigo Donut put Black British teenagers at the centre of stories about family, loyalty, grief and identity. Her characters are fully realised people navigating ordinary and extraordinary circumstances at once.
Lawrence writes working-class London with real warmth, refusing to flatten her characters into lessons. Her fiction assumes inclusion, rather than performing it. The books give dignity to characters that the story doesn’t have to argue for, it is a given.
Lawrence’s argument is that a shared story can cut across division in a way a policy or a slogan can’t. For her, two children with nothing else in common can sit inside the same character’s fear, grief or joy, and come out the other side of the book with something actually shared, rather than merely tolerated. That’s a bigger claim than “representation matters”.
Her career includes 20 years in the not-for-profit sector, working on social justice before she became a novelist. It’s a CV that gives her an unusually grounded read on the difference between activism and writing. Story-sharing, for her, is a tool she’s already tested, not a substitute for the tools she doesn’t have.
Whether a two-year laureateship can meaningfully shift how publishers commission, how schools stock their libraries, how gatekeepers and mediators critically engage with these difficult topics, or how children see themselves reflected on shelves remains an open question. Cultural change of that kind is slow, and symbolic appointments don’t rewrite budgets or curricula on their own, let alone the politics behind the fear Lawrence has named in herself – she recently said that she has felt “unsafe” as a Black person for the first time in her life.
But she arrives with both the personal history and the literary track record to make her argument credibly – not as an outsider calling for change, but as a writer who has already been doing the work her role now asks of the whole industry.
Ten years ago, Lawrence won the Older Readers category of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. Now she is a figurehead for the entire institution of children’s publishing, arguing that a good story is one of the few things left that can make a child, any child, feel like they belong somewhere. It’s a big claim for children’s books to carry, but Lawrence has already spent a career making it look reasonable.
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Melanie Ramdarshan Bold does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.