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In the latest in their Beyond the Secret Garden series, Karen Sands-O’Connor and Darren Chetty consider the classics. In February 2020 Barnes and Noble and Penguin Random House attempted to repackage classics in ‘Diversity Editions’ to ‘celebrate’ Black History Month in the US, producing new covers for classic texts such as The Wizard of Oz, […]
January is the month when many people are thinking about sport and exercise as part of their New Year’s Resolutions. So in their regular Beyond the Secret Garden feature, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor kick off this Olympic year with a column about sports and children’s books. 2019 was an interesting year for fiction with […]
Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor find a way to include everyone on your holiday gift list. The holiday season is an important time for children’s books. With that in mind, we thought we would offer a list of children’s books that suit a variety of reading tastes and needs. We would especially like to stress […]
In the latest in their Beyond the Secret Garden series, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor find rebellion and riot in children’s literature. In Emile (1762) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, rejecting the prevailing Christian notion of original sin, argued that children are born innocent and only become corrupted through experience. This view influenced the so-called ‘Golden Age of […]
In the latest in their Beyond the Secret Garden articles, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor examine lyrics and the language of rap and hip-hop. One of the most highly anticipated books of 2019 must surely be Angie Thomas’ follow-up to the New York Times Bestseller and multi award-winning The Hate U Give (2017). On the […]
In the latest in their Beyond the Secret Garden feature, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor’s consider representations of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic voices in reference books for children. ‘The races of men found on the earth are many in number. But they may be reduced to three, namely, White men, Black men, and Tawny […]
The latest in Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor’s series looking at representations of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic voices in children’s books. The recent report published by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, ‘Reflecting Realities – A Survey of Ethnic Representation within UK Children’s Literature 2017’ included some startling statistics. Only 1% of children’s […]
In this new series for Books for Keeps, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor discuss how Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic voices have been represented in our national story of children’s literature, and how we can bring about change. Raymond Williams, in his essay, ‘Culture is Ordinary,’ commented that ‘The making of a society is a […]
By Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor. Writing for Books for Keeps (258) earlier this year, Beverley Naidoo shared how her visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territories and East Jerusalem in 2000 and 2016 informed her latest novel Children of the Stone City. Written as a work of fiction, her decision to name the city in […]
In the latest in their series examining the representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic voices in British children’s literature, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor go back to school. For many children school is their first encounter with society beyond their own family. So it is no surprise that children’s books are often set in […]
On the 31 January, the UK government started a new visa programme specifically for Hong Kong residents with a British National Overseas passport or their dependents. The Home Office expect up to 300,000 people to move to Britain over the next five years and seek citizenship in what some are calling the ‘Hong Kong Windrush’. […]
In the latest in their series examining BAME representations in children’s literature, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor delve into historical fiction. During the height of the British Empire, writers like W. H. G. Kingston, W. E. Johns, Bessie Marchant and G. A. Henty all wrote for young (white) British readers about young white British characters […]
In the latest in their series examining BAME representations in children’s literature, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor dive into series fiction and non-fiction. The series book has long been denigrated by multiple sectors involved with children’s books: literary scholars, librarians, educators, and often, even parents. As Rod McGillis wrote in his discussion of series books, ‘A book so popular […]
In the latest in their series examining the representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic voices in British children’s literature, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor examine depictions of two important anniversaries. The new year brings a transition between two 75th anniversaries: 2022’s anniversary of the partition of India, and 2023’s anniversary of the arrival of […]
New in Karen Sands-O’Connor and Darren Chetty’s series examining the representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic voices in British children’s literature. For many years, the idea of talking about racism in children’s books was controversial. It was one thing to discuss whether a children’s book was racist, although that in itself was controversial and […]
September 2019 sees the release of the second Reflecting Realities report by the CLPE (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education). Whilst the first report has had a clear impact on conversations in UK children’s publishing, there were a number of challenges, of varying thoughtfulness, posed in response. One of those was that many children’s picture […]
In the latest in their series examining BAME representations in children’s literature, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor look at prizes and British Children’s Literature At the CILIP Carnegie Kate Greenaway medal ceremony recently, Carnegie medal-winner Elizabeth Acevedo said how proud she was to be the first woman of colour to win the award. The Dominican-American […]
Part four in Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor‘s series looking at representations of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic voices in children’s books. In G. A. Henty’s A Roving Commission; or, Through the Black Insurrection of Hayti (1900), the young white protagonist, Nat Glover, comments that mixed-race people on Haiti, whom he labels mulattoes, ‘hate the whites. I […]
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