“I aim to write books where there’s hope”

PATRICE LAWRENCE, 51, worked in the voluntary sector for 20 years before coming up with the idea for her debut novel. Orangeboy (hodder) is about a young black teen sucked into a spiral of bad decisions, and deals with hugely topical issues, such as gangs and drugs. It won the Waterstone’s Prize for Older Children’s Fiction and The Bookseller’s YA Book Prize. Patrice’s latest novel, Rose, Interrupted, is out in July.

Patrice says “I was a compulsive reader and writer as a child. I never believed I could be an author though because people that looked like me just couldn’t be, could they? And children that looked like me could never be protagonists in their own stories. I never read the Enid Blyton boarding school series, for example, because I knew I’d never see anyone like me in them, so I’m excited and honoured to have been asked to enrol a black girl in the school in the Malory Towers reboot. I aim to write books where there’s hope. A schoolboy recently said one of my books had given him flashbacks because his life in care so closely mirrored that of my character. The fact that young people like him can recognise themselves in books feels incredibly important to me.”