The Bookseller.com

20th July 2008

Verna Wilkins is founder and director of children's publisher Tamarind, which has been acquired by Random House Children's Books

Never ending story

17.12.07

Twenty years ago I set up Tamarind. I had no great desire to become a publisher, but I had to. That was because my children and thousands of other black children were learning to read from books that excluded them. I was aware of the damage this exclusion could do to their sense of personal value.

For all that time, I have been a one-woman band. This week, however, I am moving to Random House Children's Books, where m.d. Philippa Dickinson has the insight, sensitivity and commitment to make sure Tamarind continues to provide books to serve this shrinking, diverse and interdependent world.

When I set up Tamarind, I had no idea what publishing was about—I just knew that I had to get good quality books into the market, no matter what the obstacles. I had to overcome the responses of some booksellers, especially outside cities, who said: "We have no children/people here like the ones in your books", or "Why don't you take these to Brixton or Moss Side?"

Black children should not have to qualify for inclusion into a world of books aimed exclusively at white children. So my task was to provide the material in an effort to redress the balance in children's publishing, and to get on my bike and sell to reluctant booksellers and any other available markets.

Another myth which still abounds is that any children's story with a main black protagonist is a book for black children. Tamarind titles are for all children. Are books with white characters for white children?  If that were so, I would have never learned to read, because I grew up in a British colony with Snow White and Goldilocks. My early maths books presented problems which asked me to work out how much coal one needed to heat the house in winter. It was 90 degrees in the shade! My Christmas carols were about snow, and my poems were of hosts of golden daffodils. No hibiscus.

I always thought education was about expanding horizons, so why were some folk so blinkered? Today this is changing, dramatically in some areas, and the market is much more receptive. Yet there is more to be done.

Tamarind has featured regularly in Books of the Year features. We are on National Curriculum reading lists and numerous BBC children's TV programmes. Our books are good quality and good fun. Until Tamarind published the classic Dave and the Tooth Fairy, no one know that tooth fairies were drop dead gorgeous, computer literate—and black.

Comments on this article