Stormzy was at the Hay literary festival yesterday bigging up his publishing house, Merky books.
“My actual dream is being 80 years old, no one cares about Stormzy any more, he’s just chilling with his dogs,” the rapper said, imagining that the book label will outlive his career as a musician. “I see someone and they say ‘Yo, I’m a published author, I sold so many books on Merky’,” he said. He added: “It’s not a vanity thing. It’s just this engine that allows black authors to come and grow and thrive."
Also there was author Malorie Blackman, who spoke about a forthcoming British Library exhibition devoted to her material. Included in the archive will be the best of the 82 rejection letters she received before her first publication in 1990.
Asked why, having publishing around 70 books since, she decided to write a memoir, she said: “People that I’d known since I was 11 didn’t know that I’d been homeless for a while and didn’t know I’d had miscarriages and so forth.... I don’t want to kick the bucket and then have people making up stories about me.”
Blackman joined the swelling ranks of writers who owe their careers to the opportunity to read when young. “I wouldn’t be talking to you now if it wasn’t for my local library” she said, adding that they need to be protcted. “I castigated an MP said to me you don’t need them because you get books on Amazon now: there are an awful lot of people in places of power who don’t have a clue.”
Asked how she dealt with her anger at the racism she experienced as a teenager, Blackman said: "I realised what kind of person I was becoming. And I didn’t really like myself very much, and I had to make a decision. Is this the kind of person you want to be... Do you really want to turn into the very people you despise?”. She went on: “It’s so easy when you meet hatred and anger to just give it right back.”
