Episode 46 - Musical - and other - Truth(s) with Jeffrey Boakye

We talked to Jeffrey Boakye and tried very hard to stay on the topic of children's books (and mostly succeeded). We talked about his middle grade series which starts with Kofi and the Rap Battle Summer, his books on music - Musical Truth and Musical World and what he is currently working on.

We detoured into what everyone got up to in the 80s and 90s when there were only four TV channels and no mobile phones and then came back to children's books and why the diversity of both authors and main characters is on the decline again.

You can find more information about Jeffrey here and the books we discussed are as follows:

Kofi and the Rap Battle Summer

Kofi and the Secret Radio Station

Kofi and the Brand New Vibe

Musical Truth, illustrated by Ngadi Smart

Musical World, illustrated by Ngadi Smart

I Heard What You Said

Faith's First Case (out Feb 2027)

And the book Jeffery recommended to us was

Wild East by Ashley Hickson-Lovence

Transcript

Ali 0:11

Hi, I'm Ali.

Katy 0:13

And I'm Katy, and welcome to Mostly Book Talk.

Ali 0:15

W e have a great episode for you with the multi-talented Jeffrey Boakye. We range over quite a few topics, but you try to keep going back to his books for children and young people, including Kofi and the Rap Battle Summer and his books about music.

Katy 0:32

We're very pleased to have with us today Jeffrey Boakye, who wears very many hats. He was an English teacher for 15 years. He is now a senior teaching fellow at Manchester University Training Teachers. He co-hosts the award-winning Radio 4 series Add to Playlist and pops up on lots of other programs as a journalist. And he is also the author of nine books, six of which are for children and young people, including Kofi and the Rap Battle Summer, two more books in that series, and two non-fiction books about music. Welcome, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 1:05

That is quite fantastic.

Katy 1:09

We were wondering when you fill in those forms when you have to get insurance and stuff, what do you actually say?

Jeffrey 1:14

You know what? I get to choose. Nowadays, I actually put author because I'm trying to manifest that the authorness of me is going to be the primary thing that I put into the world. So I quite like saying I'm an author first and foremost. Um sometimes I put that educator, these like vague terms. But writing has taken up a lot of headspace.

Ali 1:33

You probably find being an author is less risky in all of those things than being, I don't know, a journalist. But a journalist feels to me like they probably put you in the highest insurance bracket.

Jeffrey 1:43

Definitely nowadays, yeah.

Katy 1:45

Author, they just think you're sitting quietly somewhere. Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 1:49

You are in control of your own destiny to some extent, but then the books need to sell, and that's a whole other conversation. But I think that educator is actually the most accurate because that's the thing that might be the golden thread that runs throughout most of my work if you want to get into it.

Ali 2:03

I think that would be a good term for you to inhabit. And you started out as a teacher. Correct. If we were on the educator theme, and your first books were aimed at adults and were non-fiction. What made you want to write fiction for young people?

Jeffrey 2:18

Well, actually, I think look, once you start writing in a commercial sense and you know, getting books that are published, you find yourself mining yourself for experiences because you can't write out of context. You can't just sit there and think, I want to write something. You have to write about something. I know it sounds obvious, but it's really important. So the first few things I wanted to get published were about culture, the arts, but also my biography to some extent. And I didn't realise, but everything that ended up going into the Kofi series, for example, were experiences that I'd had that were just lying dormant in me that I thought would be really good adventures to turn into something for kids. And I also love stories, and I hadn't written stories, and it just so happened that the ones that I wanted to focus on were kind of linked to my own experiences growing up in the 90s, exploring worlds of music, hanging out with my mates. So that was the germ that became the Kofi series. I just wanted to write about my own experiences in a way that other people, namely kids, would find interesting. I think that's it, yeah.

Katy 3:22

So there are three books now, aren't there, in Kofi series?

Jeffrey 3:25

The Rap Battle Summer Secret Radio Station and the Brand New Vibe.

Katy 3:29

And for anyone who hasn't discovered them yet, can you just give us an overview of what Kofi's like, what he gets up to, what happens in those books?

Jeffrey 3:36

I'm so tempted to now deliver the opening 50 seconds of what I do when I introduce Kofi to kids. I don't know, man. I'm really, I'm really tempted. Go for it. All right, all right. Go for it.

Katy 3:49

Go for it.

Jeffrey 3:49

There will be a test afterwards. All right, here we go.

Katy 3:51

Okay.

Jeffrey 3:52

A boy called Kofi lives on an estate in 1994. Isn't that great? He gets into trouble, he goes to school, he lives at home with his siblings too. Now, Kofi's got plans and thoughts and big dreams that he wants to come true through money-making schemes. And his friend Kelvin, who has a stutter, reveals that his mind is the world's eighth wonder. Kelvin can remember anything. And Kofi's mind starts to fizz and ping. Maybe they can make a new magazine called Paper Jam, but there ain't no screens. Because, like I said, don't forget, 1994, no internet. So Kofi needs to find a way to get new truths for his brother's tape, cassettes, and stove begins a whole school obsession worth a few rounds of school detention. There's magazines, arcade machines, big mysteries, dramatic scenes, family viewings of gladiators on a TV of only four stations. There's coin tricks, a trip to the library. Something happens there, they'll make you say blime. It's funny, tense, gripping, rhymey with a kind of front cover that makes you say buy me. So yeah, welcome to the rap battle summer, a 90s adventure, like no other. And then everyone goes, yay!

Ali 4:53

Very good. I'm impressed.

Jeffrey 4:55

There you go. That's that's copying in a nutshell.

Ali 4:58

It is really interesting, and it is cool that it is the 90s when, as you say, there's no internet, there's none of this stuff that you're not recorded, all those stuff that happens, nobody knows what's really going on.

Jeffrey 5:10

You know what it is? It's like for us, people who were around in the 90s, it wasn't that long ago. But to these young audiences, it might as well be the Tudor times or something. It is ancient history, and it's just like you forget how very simple realities of life are actually quite magical to contemporary children, like not being able to be contacted by anyone because there's no mobile phones and no internet. That is a magical thing.

Katy 5:38

I like the landline in their house. Yeah, and you really remember that, and particularly before having fancy extensions, we're slightly older, so the we're 80s, but there was definitely a point in the 80s when fancy extensions could have more than one phone in the house because at one point you just had one phone, and then maybe there'd be an upstairs phone.

Jeffrey 5:58

So if you want to talk to someone, you could actually go in private, and then if someone else picked up the other line, they would hear your conversation. Yeah, yeah. It's just like little things like that.

Ali 6:09

Yeah, it's a lost art, isn't it? Being able to pick up a phone and listen in without anyone knowing.

Jeffrey 6:15

Many lost arts, how to rewind a cassette tape with nothing but a pencil, you know, or a Biro, you know, all these things. Yeah.

Ali 6:22

But cassettes are coming back, apparently.

Jeffrey 6:25

I I feel like Gen Z, to use that catch-all term, have got a fascination with analogue experience. I think actually every generation is obsessed with the analogue of the past, like be it vinyl or something. It's always gonna happen as a kickback to this very, very digitized, super consumerist, super slick online world. People want something they can hold, something that's got value in and of itself, something that isn't gonna give you paid adverts. So, yeah, there's a timeliness to the Kofi series because I feel like 30 years is a good gap to get a bit misty-eyed about the past and to introduce new generations to like their nostalgia. You know what I mean?

Ali 7:03

And do you have to explain it to them, or do you find that kids do you get No, they have no idea what you're talking about, they have no idea.

Jeffrey 7:09

If you say landline to a kid, you have to say it like you're introducing a whole new word to their vocabulary, like say landline radio station, like they have no idea. It is it's really funny when you give them the objects, like you give a kid a Walkman and say, make that work. It's so funny watching them try to make it work. They don't know you have to pull it open or like you have to push a button, they're like stroking it like it's touch screen.

Ali 7:32

Imagine what they'd do if the cassette tape got stuck and they had to like gently pull it out with the colours. Oh my goodness, yeah, listen. That's what I mean.

Jeffrey 7:40

But I think one of the things a lot of a lot of adult readers, you know, teachers, librarians, parents, carers, what they responded to well with the Covey series is that there is this intergenerational conversation that it opens up. And I think that that's important because as the adults of the world, you get you start to get older and you start to think about the world in terms of what it used to be like, but that can quickly be forgotten, you know, and it's quite nice in a way to swim in the recent past and also introduce younger people to join you. So it's a bit of time traveling in a way.

Ali 8:16

Yeah, it also makes some things possible, doesn't it? His great entrepreneurial scheme is photocopying this magazine. The idea now of doing something on, I mean, obviously, we still do photocopies are the great survivors, but the idea of photocopying something couldn't, yeah.

Jeffrey 8:35

It's like you couldn't have this story set now. Because if you wanted to make money off song lyrics, you'd make a website or something. But the idea of having to make a fanzine, which was a real that's a real cultural thing. Like a fanzine is a serious piece of culture in in youth. It's kind of like home alone. Like the movie Home Alone wouldn't work nowadays because you just call your mum, wouldn't you? Like, I'm at home.

Ali 8:59

Yeah, home go home. Wherever God has to come back and get you. Yeah, it's interesting because there seems to be I was in it's just a big comic. Forbidden Planet, yeah. Yes, and they was it gosh, I can't remember. They have a full uh sort of display of fanzines and comics that are like really short run. That has become one of their things, and I think it's quite interesting that there is that move back to the sort of short-run, quite niche and fan-generated material.

Jeffrey 9:29

I get excited. I love comics, by the way. So you just listed my adolescence there, just in Forbidden Planet and Gosh. I remember when Gosh was just opposite the British Museum back in the old days. I mean, there's a reason that books have survived, right? By all logic, books should have gone the way of you know stone tablets by now, but we still value the thing that has been created and you can hold, like it still holds so much value. And I think the fanzine is in that family of an artifact that you can hold and experience and touch, you know. I think it's important.

Ali 10:03

Yeah, it's that being part of a small little group, isn't it? Because it is limited, it's like you're in in the no. Because football, it big in football as well, was fanzines, like for your your tribe in your football. Yeah, when I used to go and watch Man City, I can't remember what it was called now, but there was a fanzine then, those kind of things that were literally were just for the people who went to football, and it wasn't like 120,000 people and everyone throwing them all over the globe.

Jeffrey 10:30

It was the people actually at the football match watching it's that it's that slightly obsessive nerdiness, but commitment to the tribe, which is always going to speak to young people because you're always trying to find your place in the world, aren't you? So yeah.

Ali 10:45

And Kofi has that particular interest, doesn't he? The way in which the rap battles become the thing in the school, and then later on, once once the school bans them, inevitably bans it, it goes bigger. In terms of the story, did with the trilogy, did you map that all out from the beginning or did you know it was going to be a trilogy from the outset?

Jeffrey 11:05

My original plan, which I may well stick to, is I wanted to write seven of them. I wanted to do take Kofi from the cusp of secondary school all the way through to late adolescence, which would mean coming of age, more or less, in the year 2000. So I wanted it to be this kind of like millennial story. Critically, he's basically my age, and so he'll be about 18 when you're starting to get the internet, you're starting to get mobile phones, and you're starting to see a development of all these subcultures into mainstream culture. And that was the plan to chart that through his time at school with this series of adventures, you know, seven of them. So that's still in my head. It just means that I've got four more to write if I'm gonna do this. Like I need to get on with it.

Ali 11:54

You need to fit that in somewhere in amongst everything. Yeah, yeah. And obviously, one of the things we listed when we introduced you was about music, which is really central in the Kofi books, and it's obviously really clearly something that's really important to you. So, were you conscious of passing that enthusiasm on through the books? And was it something you used when you were teaching as well?

Jeffrey 12:14

Always. I mean, I've I've always got the same advice to new teachers, which sounds super obvious, but it's often missed when they when you're too busy trying to be a good teacher. Bring your passion to the classroom. If you love something, you must bring it with you into every room you go into because your enthusiasm is not only gonna energize you, but it's gonna light other people up. And it doesn't matter if they share the passion or not. So I've always been really enthusiastic about words, music, lyrics, poetry. And I was lucky enough to have two older sisters, which meant that I'd recommend if you haven't got two older sisters, go find some. It's really, really good because I was looking at the world through the eyes of these two adolescent young women. So I was like the younger brother that was exploring all of these landscapes through them. So their music became music that I was listening to. So I was exploring worlds of like amazing genres that really weren't aimed at me, you know, dance hall music from Jamaica and RB and hip-hop and soul, and a lot of these musical movements. They had these big eras in the 80s and 90s that looking back, it was like watershed moments when something happened. So all of that has always been sitting in me. It's a lot of black music as well. So my kind of cultural heritage is being shaped by this, by these musical moments, and all of that definitely comes into my teaching, and it would inevitably come into my into my writing too, because I can see not only the joy it can bring to people, but there's a lot to learn socially and culturally about these musical moments. That's the thing about music that I really love. It it mirrors an age, it questions an age, it reflects an age, it invites you to understand what's going on through music, culture, the conversations that artists are having. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really, really exciting.

Ali 14:06

That was what musical truth was, wasn't it? It was that kind of black British history through music, which was excellent, and then musical world, which followed it as well.

Jeffrey 14:13

Yeah, definitely. I really wanted with musical truth because it was around that like 2020, 2021, that Black Lives Matter uptick during the pandemic, and people were really starting to think about well, how are we tackling racism? And I remember making a making a spider diagram of all the things that I could do that might help get people to understand racism within the remit of my sort of control. So I thought, what could I write as a journalist? What am I doing as an educator? And I wrote a tiny thing, a book for children about race history, brackets, and music. And that was musical truth, just that one idea. And I thought I could, I could probably do that because I like music and I know a little bit about how racism operates, and I think it's important enough to try this. And that was the germ of that idea.

Ali 15:08

It works really well for us because we we do quite a lot of work with our in with our book clubs in schools hat on in people referral units, amazing, and places where people, you know, they might not want to pick up our whole book, but actually books that might speak to them or have chapters that they could read, and then you like, and here's the music you can listen to, and then read about it and get a bit of history all in one.

Jeffrey 15:29

That's amazing. All power to you. That's that's incredible. That's that's some of the most important work there is as well. You're working with some of the most marginalized and excluded kids, the ones that don't make it through mainstream. That's uh that's huge to me because I think that's again, as someone that's taught lots of different kids. Some kids really struggle with academia, it doesn't work for them. Mainstream school doesn't work for them. And when I wrote Musical Truth, I wanted to make sure it was accessible. And the easiest thing to do is to put a song on. Like, you don't even need to know what the song is, you're gonna hear it, you're gonna feel something. So, in a weird sort of way, it was a bit of a DJ move as well. Like, like, what am I gonna play? And then what can I say about what I'm playing?

Ali 16:11

And there's quite a few books now that have playlists and I think. Yeah, yeah. It was we're kind of finding that a bit with books. I gotta think, well, I'll remember in a minute, as we say. Fortunately, we can edit this. I'll remember in a minute the one that I'm thinking of that's got our own playlist with the book. Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey 16:26

I don't know that I want to say like Queenie by Candice Williams has got a playlist attached to it. There's a few other books, fiction and non-fiction. I mean, my first book, whole title, was a playlist, it was like 70 odd songs, and I just wrote about each one. So, yeah, there's there's something very inviting about a playlist, like a mixtape almost, which I'm not do people still do mixtapes? I don't know. Is it a thing?

Katy 16:52

I didn't know. I have a box of my husband's mixtapes in our loft. We do not have a device that they could be played on. Wow. Oh, I do. He will not let me get rid of them.

Jeffrey 17:03

Ama zing. Are they to you? Is this like the

Katy 17:06

no, they're not. They're because they pre-we've known each other since the late 90s, but it predates that. Wow. Because by then everyone was moving on to CDs, so they are from pre our knowing each other.

Jeffrey 17:20

That's incredible.

Ali 17:21

Yeah, but one from my husband, I've got a love mixtape, bless him.

Jeffrey 17:26

It's very, very cute.

Ali 17:27

Yeah, I've made it to a Spotify list, which is quite cool.

Jeffrey 17:30

That's very sweet.

Ali 17:31

Yeah, because that's what everyone's doing now is playlists, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 17:35

Playlists are essentially mixtapes, but they sort of haven't got an end. You just keep on adding to them.

Katy 17:40

Definitely having that ability to go, look, here is a book, and here is the playlist that goes with it, with them both Musical Truth and Musical World has been a great way into them for young people just uh for everyone, but also for those young people who may be a bit skeptical that they're gonna enjoy a book.

Jeffrey 17:57

Yeah, yeah. I'm really, really pleased to hear that. And and I keep telling people as well, like, I write books in ways that I hope people just copy the format. Like, I'm I I really want to see a bunch of musical worlds out there because that's my list, but everyone would have a different list. Yeah, and no one takes them up on the offer. I was like, no, go just copy what I've done, do your version, and then let's just get a load of them out there. Yeah, have the IP, just call it musical world my edition or whatever.

Katy 18:23

You wrote very powerfully. I've been listening to the audio version of it, which is quite odd because you're in my head now, your voice. But in I heard what you said about your experiences as a black teacher and some of the inherent racism in the education system in schools and classrooms, how you experienced that, how you saw that being experienced by your pupils. In the Kofi trilogy, it is essentially a very funny book, but you don't shy away from those issues around race and identity and inequality. And there are points in the first book where Kofi's uncle gets into an altercation with a police officer, which is clearly a racially charged situation. How important was it to be really upfront and having those in the books? And how did you what do you position those for young people to open up some of those discussions?

Jeffrey 19:17

Yeah, I think that I mean, I always center truth and joy in my writing. So those two things have to be happening, and the truth of someone's lived experiences is gonna shape their reality. So I'm not trying to like crowbar um, you know, a political message into my books or a cautionary tale or a warning. But the reality is if you're growing up in an urban environment in the 1990s in a community which is populated largely by immigrant communities of various diasporas, you're gonna have an unfair structural proximity to social deprivation, to lack of opportunity, to maybe high rates of unemployment, to interactions with the police, for example, that are gonna be less than favourable. And these are realities. Like if you look at history, that's what it was like in Brixton in the 1980s, where I grew up. That's what it was like in Notting Hill in the 1950s. So that's just the reality of Kofi's world. And at the core of it, he's got this beautiful, loving family. There's a reason why Kofi's family is like watertight and loving, because I didn't want it to be like he's got something in his life which is completely falling apart and he's having to fight through that. He's got a really good foundation, his communities work, yeah, but the context around that, there are structural problems, and this is the truth of life for many people in many different ways. So I feel like what that allowed me to do was from a writerly point of view, it allowed me to have a very clear antagonist, which didn't have to be this like evil character. There are very few, it's it's quite an easy thing to do to create an even antagonist, you know. Lots of writers would do that because you need one, someone who's just like you need them squashed. I create the antagonism in the realities of of life, like the lack of opportunity, the education system, and its mistrust of black boys, the way that the police might be suspicious of black communities, black men in particular, and how that plays out. That's the antagonist. And these are the things that Kofi is wrestling with. He's trying to, how am I gonna become this millionaire that I want to be in this world? How am I gonna, how am I gonna transcend, you know, these flats and it it's in a weird sort of way, without turning it into a a thesis or a dissertation. It's the same stuff that I discuss in my nonfiction for adults. It just so happens that I put it into a really adventurous, funny, charming musical story about friendship. So you're getting in and out of scrapes. Yeah.

Katy 21:57

Yeah. No, he does get into a lot of scrapes. Does he can't help me?

Jeffrey 22:01

He's learning. Kelsey's learning.

Ali 22:03

It'll be fine.

Jeffrey 22:05

Yeah. And he's nothing like me either. I I was more like Kelvin, his very quiet, bookish sidekick. That's kind of more my vibe.

Ali 22:14

And I think in I hear what you said, you talk about there aren't that many characters that exist in children's books. Quite often they're the sidekick, they're not the main protagonist in that group of friends. And do you think that is changing? I know the reflecting reality research changes all the time. And that's the last one they did sort of said it had gone down.

Jeffrey 22:32

Yeah, it's rolling back again. Uh whenever you see a swell in you know representation or a kind of push for inclusion and diversity, it is like the waves on the shore. It kind of rushes forward and it pulls back again. And unfortunately, we're seeing sort of like lower levels of representation in terms of racialized diversity in mainstream publishing than even before 2020. I again, you know, part of the reason why I write the books I write, because I could write about anything. I don't have to write about race. I could write about anything, but it's because I do feel like it's important to have a diverse range of lived experiences across the piece. It's very important. Every protected characteristic has a perspective on the world that everyone can learn from. We need a range of sexualities, a range of backgrounds, a range of ethnicities, a range of neurodivergences, all of it makes for better reading. And I and it frustrates me when I see the mainstream defaulting to a single narrative over and over again, purely for that reason that we all we can all learn so much more.

Katy 23:40

Why do you think it has gone back? I mean, not just about having black authors and visible black characters, main characters. It's also gone back on some of those other aspects of diversity too, and that there was a real push, and now we're retreating again. What is it? I mean it's really simple. It's really puzzling.

Jeffrey 23:58

It's really puzzling, but it's really simple. The status quo wants to win. And the status quo hate to break it to anyone who didn't know who's listening in, but we live in a very heteronormative capitalist patriarchy, you know, post-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. And that means that there are certain not identities, but certain power, power bases that have control and will retain control, and our world is shaped along these lines, and it does not want to change. So anything that nudges a change starts to feel like it's gonna destroy the world. So people want things to be as they have been. And so it's safer, ironically, to default to what was already there. In something like literature, oh my goodness, it does feel like you're shaking the table when you start to introduce new ideas, narratives, perspectives that have been marginalized because it is a bit of a challenge, you know. It was illegal to be gay in this country until 1967. I mean, so when you start centering LGBTQ plus narratives, you're shaking the table a little bit because you're saying this thing that was once seen as abnormal, criminalized, now deserves attention. Some people don't want that. They'd rather have the safety of a straitjacket that they were born into rather than to have some new light shone in their eyes that feels a bit uncomfortable. But we all know, or we should all know, or we could all know, that these new perspectives are incredibly beneficial to everyone. And actually, that's how we go forward. You know, it's important that we get more perspectives, more narratives. And I suppose that's how I see it. Sorry, I'll give you a long answer to a short question there.

Katy 25:57

It feels like the younger generation will come through and change.

Jeffrey 26:00

You always hope so.

Katy 26:02

But actually, you start hearing things about the younger generation being actually quite split and split even on gender lines where women are still really quite progressive and the men are going down a much more traditionalist route and going backwards. Because it feels somehow that demographics should change it because this generation coming into the workplace now and making decisions is so much more diverse than the one that was coming in in the eight eighties when we started. But yeah, frustrating.

Jeffrey 26:30

It's not gonna happen by accident. I feel like that's the thing that people assume that we just get more progressive over time. Like, oh, we now know Pluto is not a planet, everyone knows that. Great. Like we just think that everyone

Katy 26:42

I'm still holding.

Jeffrey 26:43

I am as well. My very energetic mother just served us nine something. There's got to be key for something. Anyway, so we just assume that everyone's like getting more uh more aware of being on the right side of history, but it's not true, you know. Look at who influences young people and social media. Look at the the rise of the alt-right and the manosphere and the and the racism and misogyny you see, low key in like edgy social media culture, but also very high key in some of the language spouted by leading politicians. I mean, there's a mainstreaming, absolutely of these of these ideas that is always going to influence kids because kids are like, who's powerful? I'll be like that. And that's how we socialize. So it's really interesting. Yeah, it's why I made sure Kofi's world had very simple, strong female characters, really important. Yeah, it you know, he had to have that, and because otherwise it's a bit of a boy, boy, boy, he's doing but no, strong female characters.

Katy 27:46

I love his sister, yeah. I love his sister.

Jeffrey 27:48

She's saying she's always right as well. She's one of these people, like every middle child, always right about everything.

Katy 27:54

I imagine that she has a really good side eye as well.

Jeffrey 27:57

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And she's just as naughty as Kofi as well, but just kind of like hides it.

Katy 28:02

But she's better at getting away with it. I think the moment when he, for reasons that I can't remember, ends up in her school uniform and swept up with a bunch of girls by mistake and in an all-girls school, very classic.

Jeffrey 28:18

Yeah, yeah, he ends up on a school trip at his sister's school in his sister's school uniform.

Katy 28:24

And and and she demonstrates that actually she's running circles around that school system because she knows exactly how to get him out of there. Yeah, and any pretense that anyone else was in charge of the systems and ins and outs of that school gets go out the window because she has got that thing.

Jeffrey 28:41

I mean, it's no accident. I told you, I've got two older sisters. I I've seen how it works, man. It's like they were running the show. I was like, those two girls are running this whole situation, and the whole wearing girls' uniform again, based on real events, because my sisters did used to dress me up. There was nothing else to do. It was the 90s, there were only four channels on TV, and they'll dress me up. I can remember it at one time. They did my hair and everything, they put extensions in. It's all about six hours, you know.

Ali 29:10

You were very tolerant. It was a time when you had to make your own in enjoyment. You you when you were bored, you go, like, what can we do? Which is why, you know, up to my street was one of the nothing else to do.

Jeffrey 29:21

Let's just dress them up as a girl. Yeah, right, cool. How long have we got?

Ali 29:25

All day, all day and the entire weekend. And at the the inclusive books for children awards, there are some beams of light in in amongst all this, and awards like that we do, you know, often opportunity to shine a light on loads of different things that's happening to raise the profile of all sorts of different books. Do you think that is enough, or how else can we, as people within the space, what else should we be doing to build on this and make it a wider movement?

Jeffrey 29:55

The IBC is a great example of why inclusion is important beyond just a tokenistic sort of um performative, I'm a good person. Because what you get with inclusive books for children awards is you get this curation of books, and the quality of those books is incredibly high. Not only because the long listing is so vigorous and the short listing criteria is asking so much of these books because it's an award, but also because it recognizes that the content of these books is having to do more work just to exist in the space. So if I'm writing a book about a dog and poo, right, of which there are many, right? And I'm not having a go at books about um is fine. And I could sell that book, and it's uncomplicated because it's not challenging the status quo, like I mentioned earlier. The minute I write a book about identity, about what it means to be Muslim growing up in Britain, about what it's like to have a visible limb difference, these things that are socially maybe slightly less comfortable to talk about, that book is having to do extra work because it's not only shaping these narratives, it's also having to present them in a way that the mainstream audiences will understand and want to consume. And it's a good book as well. So the quality of the IBC long list is so high. Like, I cannot stress that enough. That's why that I really bang the drum for IBC, because I can safely say that you won't find a better collection of books written by people like contemporary writers and illustrators who are doing some of the best work out there now. And the frustrating part is that the best doesn't always rise to the top if we're talking about commercial. You know, it's usually what you find in the supermarket shelves, the same names. You look at the top 10, it's like nothing's been written the past hundred years. It's like you're gonna see the same names over and over again, and it's the big names that get more space, and it's an upward spiral for them and a downward spiral for everyone else. So I think inclusivity is something that actually it offers texture and richness that you can miss if you've got a single narrative, if that makes any sense. And I think that's that's the special part. And these books aren't it's not just like positive discrimination, they're not there because they're inclusive, they're there because they're good. And they also happen to be books about quote unquote marginalized points of view.

Katy 32:30

Yeah, I think that thing about them being appealing to everyone, because I think there was a stage where there was almost a sense of, oh, we we need to have a book that is about this particular specific characteristic, but it was sort of representation almost for the sake of representation rather than actually got really good.

Jeffrey 32:49

Exactly, exactly.

Katy 32:51

And it it works on all sorts of different levels. We've been taking the winner of the older category in the IBC, it's younger readers, Shante Timothy's supernova, which is it's a great, it's fun, it's a graphic novel, it's

Ali 33:09

bonkers.

Jeffrey 33:09

Yeah, exactly.

Ali 33:10

Yeah, it's science-y, it's just great. We've been taking it into schools. We did a really big event with a whole load of what was it, mid primary school kids, and she does a thing where she gets both the characters and then your team nova or team pink thing is whatever the possible, uh, and then asking kids what's got plastic in it, including you know, tea bags, yeah, which is great, and now just a really interesting way in. But as you say, the story is the most important thing.

Jeffrey 33:37

Yeah, yeah. It's really it'll be very disheartening to think that people would pick up a book like Supernova and think, oh, this isn't for me because this is aimed at black girls, and I'm not a black girl, so I can't read it. That would be really, really disheartening. And I'm I'm hoping that people don't look at books like that and think, oh, I'm not this character, so it's not for me. Because as a big reader myself, and I'm I'm a reader from from the 1980s when you'd you read everything that I I didn't see myself represented in lots of books, and I was reading about people who were definitely not like me. I was reading Judy Bloom two sisters, remember? So I know you can get a lot from a book that is about someone who is not like you, and I've carried that into my adult life. I'm often reminding myself, Jeff, you can't just read stuff that you already know about or written by people who share your lived experience. Go and read that book about what it's like to be a Korean storefront worker, you know, in a very sexist community because I'm not Korean, I'm not a woman, I don't work, you know, and I learn lots from all these things. So really important.

Katy 34:50

So we've been running a whole series on the so-called reading crisis.

Ali 34:54

I don't really like calling it that, but we called it that because obviously that's

Jeffrey 34:57

well a lot of people would would say it is a crisis, but yeah, I know what you mean.

Ali 35:01

Do you recognize that picture? And what should we be doing about it? Well, I think um you have to cut it back, right?

Jeffrey 35:07

To go as far back to the core of the issue as you can to understand what it is you're even looking at. So, what is the crisis? People aren't reading. All right, people aren't reading what people aren't reading books, all right. Cool. So is the issue with books, is it an issue with the act of reading? All right, has that become something which we're just growing out of as a species? All right, that's a scary thought. Well, it can't be because what do people do all the time? They consume stories. Like, hello, people sit there and watch Netflix like for hours. Like cinemas, yeah, they make a film in Hollywood, it costs $400 million, and then literally that same weekend they get their money back because people love a story. So this is interesting. People might not be reading books, but people are addicted to stories. So then the question becomes well, what are these stories? And actually, what is our publishing uh uh industry doing to uh to satisfy people's need for story? Which stories are we telling? And where do people meet books? Uh well, then we get to education, because when you're at school, this is where you meet literature. What are we using literature for in schools? Ah, we might be using it to get through these assessment hurdles a bit too much. We might have gone down that route a little bit too much. So we use our books to to judge your phonics and to get your sats and to get your GCSEs. And is that the purpose of books? Well, no, because when people queue up to watch the new Marvel movie or to watch nine hours of a box set on Netflix, they're not doing it to pass an exam, they're doing it because they want to experience something. So you go back a little bit and think, well, are we exploring literature for the right reasons at a young enough age? Where do the books come from? Is it an accident that the kids that get read to, you know, from the age of zero up to three just happen to have bigger vocabularies and do better in school anyway? Like, is that an accident? No. So I feel like the crisis isn't about just people aren't reading, it's about well, what how are we setting up literature? What is literature for? What are the these links between these spaces that are connected? Schools, libraries, libraries are closing. It's scary how many libraries are closing. I've done some research, it's really terrifying. Schools, libraries, retailers. So these places could speak to each other. And then you get these beautiful third spaces, like a lot of the work that you've described to me. It's just it's these people are so important. Your librarians, your youth workers, your social workers, your alternative provisions. They operate in these spaces where they can see things that maybe other people can't see. You can't go into a pro and be like, right, we're doing the GCSE syllabus on this, this, it's not gonna work. But you can say we're gonna have a look at this music, we're gonna do this spoken word poetry, we're gonna look at it's all literature. So I feel like there just needs to be a bit more joined up thinking, and that's often the thing that's lacking the most, actually. Someone looking at something with perspective and going, All right, what are the pieces we need to get right here? You know, the the panic is easy, but the actual take a step back and look at the whole picture that takes a little bit more, you know.

Ali 38:26

And they kind of panic around, you know, book ownership and all of those things, and whilst also closing libraries. Exactly. Yeah, holding both those things like people don't have access to books, exactly all their libraries. So well, that's why they got books, you know, and things like yeah, you know, books, what was it called? Sure start and things like that. Yeah, and then and then they're reopening them again now. But what they call they call something else, aren't they? With start in the name, but isn't sure start. Yeah, but those places where you might meet books, but also if you've got a generation of kids who aren't who weren't read to and books aren't interesting to them and now they're having kids, yes, it's then that's the kind of sort of missing fit.

Jeffrey 39:08

A lot of adults aren't reading. I think that reading for pleasure is just generally on a decline, which is a little bit scary. You then there might even need to be some level of promotion of reading to young to to children, like just not in a kind of like nanny state, like you know, you will read, you know, now you must take this book and read it. Maybe a little bit of that, but just to explain to people why it's so valuable, you know. Because if you don't know, you might not be realizing that you're doing your kid a disservice. Yeah, yeah.

Katy 39:38

If you don't want to make it sound like eating your vegetables, really close to Sally. Need to eat more broccoli and book before.

Ali 39:46

Well, we I mean, I always laugh that you know, I could have sat my daughter's A levels for her because the checks don't change. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So listen, quick question. We'll let you go because we've taken up. No, no, no, this is fine. What's next? What are you all right?

Jeffrey 40:03

How how much can I say?

Katy 40:04

Uh we love we we've heard rumors that you have an adult book coming out.

Jeffrey 40:10

This is true. I have an adult book. Um, it's Crime. Crime fiction. And it's the biggest thing. I like crime fiction. We love that. I didn't set out to write crime. I just I wanted to write this story. It really did. I just wrote this thing about a cook who works for the police, and she's a woman, she's of an immigrant background, and she's got her team, and all is well, and it all starts to go a bit wrong when her team discovers quite a large sum of money and it goes into crime. And then, like, my agent was like, You've written crime. I was like, Oh, have I? She said, Yeah, people come on dying. It's like this this has to be crime. So then it became what is technically known as cozy crime, which I didn't know existed. That's a big genre. Oh, it's the same. I didn't realize I'd written cozy crime back, and so very excited about that. Yeah, Faith Amponza is the name of the protagonist, and her series begins. And fingers crossed touch word 2027 publication of the first in the Faith and Ponza series. Yeah. There you go.

Katy 41:11

We will look out for that. Have you got any more children's books coming? We know you've got potentially four more copy ones when you get round to them. But are there any is there anything else on the way? Any more non-fiction or anything that we should look at?

Jeffrey 41:24

Oh, wait, I I I get about three good ideas a day. I'll tell you that. Three good ideas, right? Yeah, this one's gonna take over the world. This is a good one. So there's always something brewing, and as long as I feel like there's something important to say, or that little window for ideas, and my head is open, there's always gonna be something flying in there. But I like to keep on busy.

Ali 41:47

Brilliant. So finally, is there a children or YA book that you've come across recently that you think should be getting more attention than it has done that you'd really recommend to our listeners?

Jeffrey 41:59

Amazing. Wild East by Ashley Hickson Lovence is about uh a boy who's he's about 14. So it's actually a tricky age to write about, you know, like that kind of proper adolescent age, and he's not particularly into books, but then he finds himself going to a writing kind of workshop scenario, and he's also moving from one part of the country to the next. There's a lot of upheaval in his life, but the whole thing is written in this beautiful poetic prose. And I think it's I think it's one of the most beautiful books about writing that I've read in a long time, and it also makes you want to write, which is fantastic because there are moments in the book where he explores his own writing and you can feel, oh, maybe I could do this sort of energy. And yeah, it's just it's really, really subtle, really, really beautiful, lovely for that kind of teenage audience who maybe think, I don't know what to read. Yeah, Wild East by Ashley Hickson Lovence is really, really, really beautiful work.

Katy 43:13

A great recommendation. Thank you very much for your time. It's been brilliant to listen to you, and uh, we look forward to seeing what comes out next. We really hope you enjoyed that. I think you can sense that we did.

Ali 43:26

I'm not sure we can add much, but do seek out is excellent books.

Katy 43:30

And a small plug for book clubs and schools in that we have a book club guide for his first Kofi book, Kofi and the Rap Battle Summer, and also for Musical World, which works really well for ad hoc book talk sessions. So you can do any chats you like, and as we discussed, you can listen to the music too. So it's just a really good way of discussing a text and getting young people and involved and engaged in that. Yeah. So enjoy those books.