and all the funny things all smushed up like a big bouillabaisse, because I think comedy and tragedy live together. Charlie Chaplin said, “Comedy is tragedy plus time”, and I think that’s right. So, I think given the context of trying to lay out a big story, it’s just the amount of time you put between things.


Do you think childrencan handle more “grown-up” themes better now? I’m trying not to write down to the audience, I think that’s important. When I was a kid I tried to read “up”, I didn’t want the books that were supposed to be for me when I was nine. I wanted to read the older books because I was interested in older people’s stuff. So when I write, I’m writing in a way that I would have enjoyed when I was nine, 10, 11, 12. If you think about The Hobbit and books like that, they are writen in a very formal, conservative stle which isn’t talking down or up to anybody, it’s just talking to the reader and the reader could be anybody. And I’m trying to—in my own muddled, confused, late-onset—write stuff that anybody can read.


I think that if you look at what’s happening in the world and how that is conveyed to children, however kindly, in the classroom, kids are far more mature than we give them credit for. My friend Neil Gaiman thinks children should read any book they want to because they need to know what’s going on.


And could you give us a preview of your next book?


The next book is about twins who have the most dastardly luck in that both their parents, within four years, are struck by lighting and completely disappear from the face of the earth. When they realise that they are going to be sent to a boarding school up north, they don’t want to go. They want to go in search of their mum instead. Just as they’re arguing about how they are going to do it, mum’s big book of stories, myths and legends flies off a bookshelf and lands, ka-blam, in front of them and flips open. One of the pages says: “How to get to a magical kingdom.” They realise that this book has been writen and squiggled over by their mum and that it’s basically giving them the steps to find their parents. So they go to a magical kingdom, basically, which is full of Black and brown people, and they have this amazing adventure.


You have obviously written many things, from memoir to scripts to comedy—is there a different discipline or craft to writing books for children?


My writing voice is basically an encapsulation of all the things I love. I’m writing what I adore


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or what I want to see. And that’s the best thing in the world. Imagine siting in your pyjamas at your kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a hot cross bun and writing exactly what you want to write. I can’t think of anything beter. Write what you love; write what you would have loved when you were 12. When I was 12, I was reading X-Men but I was also reading Dickens. At Jessons Junior School in Dudley we had to read A Christmas Carol and I loved it. I sought out other Dickens books and read quite a lot of them. If I look back at it now, I probably skimmed a bit, but I did try and read them. The complicated nature of Dickens’ writing was challenging, but I managed to get into it. He seemed to be combining clear storytelling that was very moving and funny with massive emotional turning points.


I don’t want to feel constrained by the fact that I’m an author of colour; however, I do want to see characters that look like me in my stories


It’s certainly an influence to me,


particularly in dialogue. I read somewhere that Dickens used to speak the dialogue aloud when he wrote, so I try and do the same. I love that—I love siting or standing or walking around and being the characters. Dickens did that a lot.


What about the books you grew up with? What books really spoke to you? We had books at school, but I don’t really remember them. I remember the ones I chose to read as a result of joining Dudley Library at the behest of my Auntie Pearl. There was a book by E W Hildick called Birdy Jones, about a 12-year-old boy who wanted to be a pop star but all he could do was whistle. By many twists and turns, he makes a record and people like it. I loved that book. I loved Garam the Hunter by Herbert Best, about a young African boy who goes off on his first hunt. I’m trying now to cast


characters of colour in my books because growing up, I’d never see them in the books I was reading. Even when my daughter arrived in the early 1990s, there were very few books with Black or brown protagonists—which


was shocking to me. I know there has been a flowering recently of diversit in the children’s and young adults’ arena, but when I was growing up, there were just no books with a Black hero for me to enjoy. That didn’t mean I didn’t identify with the heroes of those books, but all the same, it would have been nice if one of the Famous Five had looked like me I read a lot of Marvel and DC Comics from the age of nine because, once again, Auntie Pearl bought me the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Iron Man, Nick Fury, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. And I was going on long journeys to Birmingham from Dudley, which is about 10 miles. It was long for us because both my parents smoked and refused to crack a window. I read these comics and the journey would slip by in the snap of a finger. And I just thought, “Oh, you’ve got me.” I still read comics. I love Gaiman, Alan Moore and Mark Millar. N K Jemisin’s Far Sector is excellent, as is Reginald Hudlin’s take on the Black Panther. They write about things that affect us and that we should be thinking about, but their characters can fire laser beams from their ears and have magical kingdoms behind a piano in their living room. Happy days.


Lenny Henry’s The


Boy with Wings was published by Macmil- lan Children’s Books in


October 2021 (hardback, 9781529067835, £12.99). The title is illustrated by Keenon Ferrell


I interviewed your agent Natalie Jerome last year and she said that your children’s books would be still read in 100 years’ time. Are you in it for the long haul? What other stories are you thinking about? Wow—I might have to slip her an envelope full of tenners! I’d like to explore different genres. The Boy with Wings is firmly wedged into the superhero genre, so I’ll do more of that; those stories are within my wheelhouse. I don’t want to feel constrained by the fact that I’m an author of colour; however, I do want to see characters that look like me in my stories. That’s great because sci-fi, historical, sword and sorcery, magic, all of these genres could do with an injection of Jamaican-ness or Nigerian-ness. I intend to do another Tunde book, because there are so many things to explore with him. There are many more adventures to have with that. The quest book is very exciting because that could spin off into a number of directions. There are nine dominions in this magical kingdom and and I’ve only been to three of them. So there’s definitely more that could happen there. But there are other stories in my brain box. As long as I’m allowed to just open my brain and pour it out onto the page, I’ll be happy.


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