As a child, Selina Brown had a Saturday routine: her mother would go shopping and leave her at the library, where she would speed her way through novels by Jacqueline Wilson and RL Stine’s Goosebumps series. Yet, as a Black girl, she rarely saw herself represented in the books on the library’s shelves.
Years later, she self-published a children’s book, Nena: The Green Juice. “I did encounter some problems,” she says. “I thought it was me alone. I spoke to other Black authors and realised there was an issue.” That became the seed for the Black British book festival, which is now in its third year.
