Advertisement
Telegraph.co.uk

Wednesday 23 April 2014

Children's Laureate Malorie Blackman: 'Children should be encouraged to read electronic books'

Speaking at the Telegraph Bath Festival of Children's Literature, Children's Laureate Malorie Blackman tackled the thorny issue of how to get children and young adults reading for pleasure again

Malorie Blackman, the Children's Laureate
Malorie Blackman, the Children's Laureate Photo: Clara Molden

The children's laureate Malorie Blackman wants to make electronic books more available to children. In an event at The Telegraph Bath Festival of Children's Literature she said we must do everything we can to encourage children to read, whatever the medium.

"If you want to read on a smart device, all power to you," she said. "It's about having great stories available, and making sure that children find these books irresistible. I personally love printed books. But as long as children are reading on some device, I'm an advocate of that."

She said there is too much snobbery attached to children's reading. "When I was at school, I used to love comics, and I remember my teacher marching up to me and ripping the comic out of my hand," she said. "We've got to encourage children to read for pleasure and read whatever takes their fancy and not be ashamed of that."

She was responding to a National Literacy Trust study which revealed that fewer children than ever are reading for pleasure (28 per cent compared with 38 per cent seven years ago), and that many children find reading embarrassing.

Blackman was addressing a packed teenage audience in the Guildhall in Bath at the beginning of the second weekend of the festival. She was discussing her new novel, Noble Conflict, a dystopian thriller set in a remote future ravaged by nuclear war, a world in which the idealistic views of the founding fathers have become corrupted and chillingly inhumane.

She said she was inspired to write the book by her daughter, who is now 18. "How many years of peace have we had in her lifetime?" she asked. "The Falklands War and the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War - there are all these conflicts going on all around the world. I just think it's so sad."

She also discussed her first initiative as children's laureate. She is keen to champion books for young adults, and is in the early stages of setting up a YA [young adult] literature convention to be held in London in July next year to celebrate the best writing for teenagers, including horror and science fiction.

The contemporary teenage market, she said, is remarkably vibrant. "There have been a number of times recently when I've sat down to read a book for adults and I've got to page 50 and thought, what is this book about? I've never done that with a YA book," she said.

How we moderate
telegraphuk
blog comments powered by Disqus
Advertisement
Advertisement

More from the web

Advertisement

Back to top

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2014

Terms and Conditions

Today's News

Archive

Style Book

Weather Forecast
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10357976/Childrens-Laureate-Malorie-Blackman-Children-should-be-encouraged-to-read-electronic-books.html
www.telegraph.co.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-15
73710
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:OIM4NARI3DMSPDKPO753GTAVYTAWSK4X
<urn:uuid:561b8ce1-e707-401a-afe8-70a7d0a1e084>
2014-04-23T16:21:09Z
23.3.13.185
sha1:LSV6EVKJYOGZ2A5QYIU7O73I3GZKAACL
<urn:uuid:89892f23-d46f-4e71-9bde-7b1d631eb623>
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10357976/Childrens-Laureate-Malorie-Blackman-Children-should-be-encouraged-to-read-electronic-books.html
response
<urn:uuid:ce1390ca-2395-4e4f-ad39-fcf56cce3d4a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-15
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for April 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf