Lawrence\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
This approach comes at time when belonging is keenly important. Recorded hate crime has risen again<\/a>, and a party built substantially on hostility to immigration has spent the past year outpolling both the Conservatives and Labour<\/a>. This is why Lawrence\u2019s laureateship lands differently than it might have two, three or even ten years ago.<\/p>\n Lawrence is a writer for children and young people who is passionate about social justice. During her time as BookTrust\u2019s writer in residence, she made clear the children she wrote for were those who\u2019d arrived in Britain as refugees, who are growing up in foster or residential care, or who are navigating life with a parent in prison.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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\u2019s literature is foundational to whether a child sees reading as something meant for them, rather than a nice thing other people get to have.<\/p>\n Her novels make the case better than any keynote could. Books like Orangeboy<\/a> and Indigo Donut<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n 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\u2019t have to argue for, it is a given. <\/p>\n Lawrence\u2019s argument is that a shared story can cut across division in a way a policy or a slogan can\u2019t. For her, two children with nothing else in common can sit inside the same character\u2019s fear, grief or joy, and come out the other side of the book with something actually shared, rather than merely tolerated. That\u2019s a bigger claim than \u201crepresentation matters\u201d. <\/p>\n Her career includes 20 years in the not-for-profit sector, working on social justice before she became a novelist. It\u2019s a CV that gives her an unusually grounded read on the difference between activism and writing. Story-sharing, for her, is a tool she\u2019s already tested, not a substitute for the tools she doesn\u2019t have.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t rewrite budgets or curricula on their own, let alone the politics behind the fear Lawrence has named in herself \u2013 she recently said that she has felt \u201cunsafe\u201d as a Black person<\/a> for the first time in her life. <\/p>\n But she arrives with both the personal history and the literary track record to make her argument credibly \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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