Diverse Book Award winner for Best Children’s Book Benjamin Dean talks to Pen&inc. about following your dreams and his winning book, Me, My Dad and the End of the Rainbow. He is one of three winners in the Diverse Book Awards 2022, alongside Natasha Bowen for Best Young Adult Book and Kia Abdullah for Best Adult book.
BENJAMIN Dean is a former celebrity reporter, who decided to swap the late nights chasing exclusives on the red carpet for his passion for storytelling as a YA and children’s author. He had been writing and working on the celeb circuit for a number of years, but realised that he couldn’t do both – and so took the decision to become a full-time author while he was writing his third book. He says: “It was a tough decision, for sure. I fell into my last job straight out of uni and I was pretty comfortable in what I was doing. Celebrity reporting was always something I’d wanted to get into, so it felt like the dream job. But being an author has always been the big goal and when I started balancing both jobs at the same time, I quickly realised that I was stretching myself too thin.
“It was around writing my third book, The King is Dead, and I was just completely burned out. I knew I had to make a decision for my personal and
mental health. It felt like a huge risk to leave behind the comfort and safety of a well-paid job, but I’d never have forgiven myself if I didn’t give chasing my dreams a proper shot, so I decided to take the plunge and focus all of my attention on books. I’m so glad I did!” Benjamin had already written his Diverse Book Award-winning Me, My Dad and the End of the Rainbow when he took the decision to concen- trate solely on his young adult and children’s books. He was working on The King is Dead, a YA LGBTQ+ novel about a young prince who ends up on the throne at the age of 17 – and with a mystery to solve after his boyfriend goes missing.
“I’d always wanted to write YA,” says Benjamin, “so it was a natural progression for me to try something in a slightly older space than what I’d originally been writing. YA is defi- nitely a change of pace and explores a lot of topics that you can’t touch on in middle grade, so it’s a lot of fun to have that variation.
Spring-Summer 2023
PEN&INC. 31
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