Any anxieties publishers have about putting a child on the front cover of a book who isn't white is very old fashioned.
I didn't even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn't afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local library reading as much as I could and getting out as many books as I could.
What I want is to try and get across the idea that reading for pleasure is so beneficial. And turn children on who have maybe been switched off reading or never found a love of it in the first place.
Children will go with any story as long as it's good, but white adults sometimes think that if a black child's on the cover, it is perhaps not for them.
I'm one of the few adults lucky enough to love their job. And when you've got bills to pay, you get on with it! I like challenges.
I believe each individual can have a say and make a difference.
Children find prescriptive reading lists daunting, and they are a dangerous thing to have in schools.
When I was a child, we used to look forward to the end of the day when we would hear another ten minutes of a story.
Book sales and teens reading is always a fantastic thing, but we should also be celebrating and consuming the huge wealth of U.K. and U.K.-based writing and illustrating talent. Authors such as Charlie Higson, Darren Shan, Holly Smale, Tanya Byrne, Catherine Johnson, Sophie Mckenzie, to name but a few.
A good book is a good book. End of story.
The worst thing about being the laureate has been the attitude of a tiny minority of adults who haven't liked some of the things I'm supposed to have said and who have used it as an opportunity to be verbally abusive and nasty, but I haven't let it rule my world!
I have encountered those who feel that libraries have served their purpose and are no longer needed. There are those who consider them a soft target when it comes to local authority budget cuts. In certain political quarters, there is a refusal to see that our public library service needs active protection.
In a television interview, I said that diversity in our children's books should include the adventures of disabled children, travellers and gipsies, LGBT teens, different cultures, classes, colours, religions. It shouldn't be a token gesture, nor do such stories need to be 'issue-based'.
I hope to instill, in every child I meet, my love and enthusiasm for reading and stories.
I'm a voice for children's books and children's reading.
I loved reading when I grew up but did feel totally invisible because I couldn't see myself and my life reflected in the books I was reading.
