On Loan from the National Portrait Gallery
Children’s novelist and script writer, Blackman was the first Black writer to hold the position of Children’s Laureate (2013-15).
Born to Barbadian parents in London, she started writing at age 28, and rose to fame with her first children’s novel Hacker (1992). Blackman drew on her own personal experience of racism for her ground-breaking Noughts and Crosses series (2001-08), about a teenage love story in an alternate dystopia with reverse race relations.
Blackman has written episodes for the popular children’s television drama Byker Grove (2004), and became the first person of colour to write for Doctor Who (2018).
2016
Archival inkjet print