REVIEW

Verna Wilkins gave an inspirational talk to an appreciative full house at the first meeting of the Galley Club’s new season on 8 October.

As a pioneering publisher and author of multicultural children's books, Verna founded Tamarind Books in 1987 to provide a high positive profile for black children, which was lacking in existing children's books. She firmly believes literature is a catalyst for integration and that books have the power to include or to ignore but also to create modern-day heroes.Her books also include Asian, Chinese and disabled characters. Her stated aim is to go all out to redress the balance in publishing by presenting images of similarities and differences so that children will learn to accept differences without fear.

Growing up in Grenada in the Caribbean, she herself was taught from English books and at times struggled to see the relevance of calculating how many hundredweight of coal it would take to heat the house when it was 90° outside! However, it was when her eldest son came home from school one day with a book he had made about himself, with pink skin, that made Verna take action. When asked why he had portrayed himself as pink, her son thought his picture had to be that colour because it was for a book and people in books always had pink skin. Although Verna had no knowledge of publishing, she felt she had to do something about this. She admits now that if she had known then what she knows now, she perhaps would not have embarked on this ambitious venture. Thankfully, however, as her son has often remarked, she is “unfettered by reality”.

She began by visiting her local schools (at that time, Camberley in leafy Surrey) to see what teachers thought about her producing books whose characters were black children. She was encouraged to produce three books that included jigsaw puzzles. The Sunday Times did a feature spread and as a result Verna received 450 letters and was contacted by enthusiastic writers and illustrators who wanted to become involved. Tamarind Books has since gone from strength to strength. Verna still spends time in schools because she is inspired by children. She spent Children's Book Week in an East London school that had selected Dave and the Tooth Fairy as their chosen book. Tamarind Books are also very popular in the Caribbean – Verna takes pleasure in giving something back and goes back every year to its annual literary festival.

Verna has written and published a series of biographies of high-achieving black people including Benjamin Zephaniah, Malorie Blackman, David Grant and Rudolph Walker that featured in Black History Month. Tamarind's The Life of Stephen Lawrence won a Book of the Year award. Stephen Lawrence had read Tamarind books as a young child, and his mother asked Verna to write his biography.

Recently, Tamarind Books has become an imprint of Random House, which has provided greater publishing opportunities – a commitment to publish 10 books a year and much-needed premises in Ealing so that Verna gets her dining room back! However, Verna’s creativity in marketing her books  provided Random House with a new challenge when she took her books to a black hair and beauty fair in London. After a successful day, she presented the finance department with a carrier bag containing £1200. When they said they couldn’t accept it without invoices, she replied, “Give it back to me then – I’ll buy Jimmy Choos with it!”

Looking to the future, Verna would eventually like to hand the reins over to someone else and devote herself to writing full-time (preferably about “fit young men”!) and buying more Jimmy Choos. She would dearly love to see more black people in publishing and 3 years ago set up the Independent Black Publishers Group, a support network of seven other publishers, including Mango Publishing and Brown Skin Books.

We were glad to hear that Verna enjoys the whole creative process of producing and writing books, and is no longer a reluctant publisher.

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