Candice Brathwaite doesn’t remember exactly where she was when she first saw Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman, but she remembers how it made her feel. “There was a little Black girl on the cover with hair like mine,” she says. “It was a defining moment. This is after years of reading books like Biff and Chip, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I went to a predominantly Black primary school in Brixton. But there was definitely a lack of literature where us kids could say: ‘Oh, this character looks like me.’”
Brathwaite is now an author herself – she penned the memoirs I Am Not Your Baby Mother and Sista Sister, and recently released Cuts Both Ways, her first foray into young adult fiction. “It was really important to me that the characters were unmistakable Black teenagers,” she says. “There’s still a huge gap in that genre in terms of diversity.” She’s also mum to daughter Esmé, who’s nine, and son RJ, who’s almost five. And while there are certainly a wider range of diverse characters in children’s literature now, compared with when she was growing up, Brathwaite says there’s still work to do.
