Malorie Blackman – writer Blackman was born in Clapham, London. Her parents were both from Barbados. At school, she wanted to be an English teacher, but she grew up to become a systems programmer instead. She earned an HNC at Thames Polytechnic and is a graduate of the National Film and Television School. Blackman's first book was Not So Stupid, a collection of horror and science fiction stories for young adults, published in November 1990. Ever since, she has written more than 60 children's books, including novels and short story collections, and also television scripts and a stage play. Her work has won over 15 awards. Blackman's television scripts include episodes of the long-running children's drama Byker Grove as well as television adaptations of her novels Whizziwig and Pig-Heart Boy. Her books have been translated into over 15 languages including Spanish, Welsh, German, Japanese, Chinese and French. Blackman's award-winning Noughts & Crosses series, exploring love, racism and violence, is set in a fictional dystopia. Explaining her choice of title, in a 2007 interview for the BBC's Blast website, Blackman said that Noughts and Crosses is "one of those games that nobody ever plays after childhood, because nobody ever wins".[8] In an interview for The Times, Blackman said that before writing Noughts & Crosses, her protagonists' ethnicities had never been central to the plots of her books. She has also said, "I wanted to show black children just getting on with their lives, having adventures, and solving their dilemmas, like the characters in all the books I read as a child." Blackman eventually decided to address racism directly. She reused some details from her own experience, including an occasion when she needed a plaster and found they were designed to be inconspicuous only on white people's skin. The Times interviewer Amanda Craig speculated about the delay for the Noughts & Crosses series to be published in the United States: "though there was considerable interest, 9/11 killed off the possibility of publishing any book describing what might drive someone to become a terrorist". Noughts and Crosses is now available in the US published under the title Black & White (Simon & Schuster Publishers, 2005). Noughts & Crosses was No. 61 on the Big Read list, a 2003 BBC survey to find "The Nation's Best-Loved Book", with more votes than A Tale of Two Cities, several Terry Pratchett novels and Lord of the Flies. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours. In June 2013, Blackman was announced as the new Children's Laureate, succeeding Julia Donaldson. .