BookTrust Represents: Supporting new talent into the mainstream
BookTrust Director Jill Coleman explains how its Represents project is taking steps to re-balance the talent pipeline.
B
ookTrust Represents is a ground-breaking new project created by BookTrust, the UK’s
largest children’s reading charity, as a direct response to the lack of authors and illustrators of colour within the children’s book world. In 2019, we published a piece of research in collaboration with University College London looking at the number of authors and illustrators of colour published over the last 11 years. In 2017, the last year of the study, fewer than six per cent of children’s book authors and illustrators were people of colour. That is compared to 32 per cent of school aged children.
BookTrust Represents is determined to raise that to a minimum of 10 per cent by 2022. We have been supporting aspiring creators of colour by offering them free training sessions to help them navigate the publishing business and we have built a thriving online community to provide creators with information and resources.
Surfacing talent
We are also promoting the work of published creators of colour through events in bookshops, festivals and schools – all children need and deserve to experience a diverse range of voices in their reading. And by putting talented creators of colour in front of school children we hope to inspire the writers and illustrators of the future. There is a well-known saying “if you can’t see it, you can’t be it”. We want to show children of
colour that writing or illustrating is a job they could do. Each published author is also shadowed by an aspiring author on the visits to give them the valuable first- hand experience of working with their audience in a school.
“ We have many requests
from parents and teachers for more diverse books, there is a big demand out there which we cannot yet meet properly. Children need and deserve to see themselves in books, and to have access to a rich and diverse range of voices because if they do, it can be life changing.
In 2019, the first year of the project, we visited over 900 schoolchildren across Leeds and Birmingham, giving them the chance to meet a real-life author or illustrator for the first time and experience the joy and excitement that getting lost in a book can bring. Access to books is also key, especially for children whose families wouldn’t ordinarily visit bookshops – perhaps because of accessibility, they may live further out, or because of financial difficulty, so we made sure that at every school visit, each student takes home a signed copy of their very own book for free. We also had a pop-up book fair with the publisher Scholastic for two of the reception classes we visited. Allowing the children to choose their own book and giving them the authority to pick
Jill Coleman (@jillcoleman17) is Director of BookTrust.
something they want to read is so important and really encourages the reading habit.
Future plans
With lots of exciting plans in the pipeline, 2020 is going to be even bigger and better. BookTrust Represents will reach more children – we’re visiting thirty more schools, this time in Bristol, Liverpool and Newcastle. We’re going back to Leeds for an event that brings together more than 1,000 children from 25 local schools. We’re going to reach even more creators of colour – we’re taking more budding authors and illustrators out on the road to key industry festivals like Cheltenham and Hay and we’re hosting more practical training workshops with published authors, illustrators and agents where aspiring creators can get practical, hands on advice from those who have come before them. In September 2020, we will be publishing the updated research on the number of creatives of colour published in 2018-2019. This will be the halfway point to our goal of increasing the number from under six per cent to more than 10 per cent by the end of 2021 and we hope and expect to see some significant movement in that direction.
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