Imagine a world just like ours, but in photographic negative. Black people are the educated elite, the dominant ruling class. White people are the minority, employed only in menial jobs, without legal rights or representation. This is the world that Malorie Blackman, one of Britain’s leading children’s writers, has imagined in all its details, after needing a plaster one day and being struck that the only ones available were pink, and designed to blend with a white person’s skin. It’s something she would never have noticed but for the fact that she is black – the only black writer to have got into the top 100 of the nation’s favourite books in the BBC’s The Big Read with Noughts & Crosses, the novel that describes this inverted world, and the doomed love between a black “Cross” girl, Sephy and a white “Nought” boy, Callum.

Filled with love, sorrow, suffering and stinging satire on injustice it is a quite remarkable novel, not least in tackling the subject of race with brilliant simplicity. Every page shocks; Knife Edge, the sequel, is no less stunning. The style is simple and direct, but the ramifications of what it describes thought out in devastating detail. Children’s fiction has long been the repository of great satirical writing, but Blackman’s trilogy takes it into levels unseen since Orwell’s 1984.

Malorie Blackman herself seemed like the last person to write such revolutionary fiction because what she was known for, until very recently, was being a black author who didn’t make an issue out of colour. Prize-winning novels such as Pig-Heart Boy, (successfully filmed for the BBC), and Hacker, presented its child-heroes who just happened to be black - ordinary people in extraordinary situations and adventures. In person, she is a woman whose infectious laughter makes her seem like the opposite of Jude, the hate-filled terrorist murderer whose mind we inhabit for almost half of Knife Edge. She did, she says, “find it hard to write him”; nevertheless, the violent racism she describes in her inverted world springs from personal experience as well as observation.

“When I see a group of white boys, I get nervous. Last year in Bromley I was coming out of Sainsbury’s and got called “jungle bunny” and spat on by a group. Black guys have called me a slag because my daughter is mixed-race. I think things have got worse, although I am an optimist. A pessimistic optimist.”

To a white reader, the world of Noughts & Crosses seems more reminiscent of South Africa under apartheid than modern Britain. One of the things I’ve always found comforting, I tell her, is the belief that in Britain, unlike America, what matters is your education rather than your race. Blackman says at once,
“Only if everyone is on a level playing field. Education has become a privilege, not a right.”

Blackman herself went to a Peckham grammar school. The daughter of a carpenter father who was never satisfied with her academic results (“if I got 95% in a test he ask, What happened to the other 5%” she recalls), she shared a love of reading with her mother, a seamstress. Her father did not value novels. Her childhood sounds happy, but her parents separated when she was 13. Lizzie, her exquisite 8-year-old daughter, by Neil, her Scottish husband of 23 years, is at a fee-paying school. We talk of Diane Abbot’s choice to educate her son privately. She says, “I go to schools all over the country, and in too many of them teachers say to me, Oh, don’t expect much out of these [black] boys, they aren’t creative. I think how dare you! They’re only 8, 9, 10, and they’re being expected to fail. What I always tell them is that education is a leveller. If you’re good, nobody can say, “You can’t”. But getting that confidence….” She sighs. “You can do it if you think you can,and are prepared to work hard for it.”

Blackman herself loved English at school, and wanted to train as an English teacher at Goldsmiths but was told by her careers adviser that she would do better to get a business degree at the local Poly. Bored out of her skull, she began to write, and for the next two years, while she worked as a manager of the Reuters database, she endured rejection after rejection from publishers.

“I go to a black women’s writers group, and we all got told, “black women don’t go to college.” It’s such insidious stuff. Kids are still amazed when I walk in, and they see that you can be black, and a writer.”

Even when she found a publisher, it was made very clear to her that she was expected to “write about race and nothing else. But I like to confound expectations.” She grins, wickedly. “A couple of editors did say, We want something for our multi-cultural list, and I’d think, Well, you’re not getting one from me.”
What she wanted was “to read books that had me in them – fantasies, mysteries, love stories, rather than whinging. I wanted a black person on the cover, but plots that had nothing to do with that fact.”

In fact, her black friends were against her writing about racial issues such as slavery. But after eleven children’s novels, she felt she had earned the right to write ‘Noughts & Crosses’. When she addressed racism, it was to turn it on its head.
“What I always want to do is to show what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes,” she says.
Like most novelists, she draws on her own life while avoiding autobiography. Sephy’s agonising watch over her half-caste daughter is mirrored by Blackman’s daughter Lizzie being five weeks premature. “Writers are life-cannibals,” she says. “I don’t write in a vacuum.”
Equally the racist remarks made by the black ‘”Crosses” about white “Noughts” have been made about black people in her hearing. All she has done is invert it, and play with the language: Crosses are called “daggers” as an insult, Noughts, “blankers”. She laughs at the embarrassment of a friend who talked about “playing the white man”, and is hugely amused by political correctness, but underneath the laughter about finding a recipe for a dessert called “black man’s balls” there is sadness and anxiety.
“You’d think by the 21st century, we’d have got over all this. I hate the prejudice about asylumn-seekers, how they’re vilified without understanding that for every one person who takes something off the state there are so many more who are genuinely persecuted.”

She is exceptionally sensitive to the duty writers owe the truth, and her anxiety at the way we accept the printed word as “veritas” has resulted in one of the most original features of Knife Edge: facsimile newspaper reports including photographs of black policemen and elite “Crosses”. Her world is one where people ascribe criminal traits and stupidity to white people; where the teenaged boys you fear are white; where blacks are as patronising, racist, oppressive and inhumane. The first novel, Noughts and Crosses, was deliberately ambiguous as to the colour of each race until half-way through, and Blackman got letters from readers confused at seeing people referred to as a “white bastard” instead of the other way around.

“I’m a Star Trek girl, really – I grew up seeing a black actress playing Ahura on the bridge, and all nationalities working together. The best science fiction is always about the present – Star Trek was a direct attack on McCarthyism. What I want to show is that once you start hating people for being different, that hate never stops. Noughts & Crosses was a novel about love, Knife Edge is about hate, and the third novel is going to be about hope.”

As a child, she smiled at everyone, but when she became a teenager her anger and bitterness grew at the way she was treated, “until by 14 or 15 I was not going to walk down the street without an attitude. I refused to be bumped off the road and spat on. I’d only buy black papers and music. But there was one song I loved by Bobby Cauldwell, called ‘What you won’t do for love.’ I loved it so much I bought the LP. And I thought, my God – he’s white.

“So then I thought to myself, Are you going to stop playing this record you love, just because he’s white? I thank God for that, because it made me realise how ridiculous I was getting.”

Blackman’s passionate honesty goes hand-in-hand with a steely determination not go give ground on her artistic vision, however. Neither Noughts& Crosses nor Knife Edge have found a US publisher, because thought there was considerable interest, 9/11 killed off the possibility of publishing any book describing how someone might become a terrorist. The film right have been sold, but to a small independent company, 15 ½ productions, “because the big studios wanted to make the Noughts Asian, not white.”

As we talk about the positive changes that are slowly coming about in Hollywood’s portrayal of black people – “Morgan Freeman as God – YEAH!” she exclaims, laughing - I notice one thing. In all the time we have been sitting talking together in the restaurant of a London hotel, she has been completely ignored by the waiters who were hovering around me only minutes before. It’s as if Malorie Blackman, despite her vitality, elegance and intelligence doesn’t exist. But she does; and she will change the way our children see this world like nobody else.

Knife Edge by Malorie Blackman £12.99 ISBN is published by Doubleday

The Times January 2004