Crouch End author SF Said shortlisted for book award

The likes of Malorie Blackman, Children's Laureate Joseph Coelho, Phil Earle, and This Morning presenter Alison Hammond, are up for one of nine The Week Junior Book Awards in partnership with The Bookseller and World Book Day.

Blackman is shortlisted for Children’s Audiobook of the Year for Ellie and the Cat, alongside Richard Ayoade’s The Book That No One Wanted to Read, while Earle contends with Said and A. M. Dassu in the Children’s Book of the Year: Older Fiction category.

Hammond's Black in Time, celebrating inspirational Black figures from history, is up for the Older Non-Fiction (9–12 year-olds) prize. Shortlisted authors will find out which of the 76 titles has won at an award ceremony on October 2.

Author Malorie Blackman is also on the shortlist for best audio book.

Said, who has lived in Crouch End for 20 years, is of Iraqi heritage and previously worked as a speech writer for the Crown Prince of Jordan's London office, and a Daily Telegraph film critic before writing children's fiction - including the acclaimed Varjak's Paw.

Tyger is set in an oppressive near future London of choking pollution, slavery and racial segregation. Adam and Zadie are children who embark on a life changing journey when they find a magical, wounded talking animal in a rubbish dump, and try to save it.

"Although it's London in the 21st Century, it's a strange alternative world where history has gone quite differently," said Said, who likes to write in Haringey's libraries to give him the discipine of a start and finish time.

Tyger came out in hardback last October and has already scooped Book of the Year at The British Book Awards (Image: Courtesy of David Fickling Books)

"As a lifelong Londoner I feel I haven't seen my London represented in a book or movie, I wanted to put my whole experience both positive and negative into the book. London can be a place of terrifying violence, pollution and greed, but at its best it's an incredible place that has room for people of all backgrounds and identities. As someone from a migrant background, I have always felt comfortable with my identity as a Londoner. It has room for everyone."

Said acknowledges Tyger's debt to 18th Century visionary William Blake, aswell as Malorie Blackman and Philip Pullman.

"These children live in a world that's terrifying, fragile, and precarious, a world with various problems including unregulated pollution. They never see the sky because it's constantly filled with smoke belching out of what Blake would call 'Dark Satanic Mills'."

Before finding the Tyger, Adam has to carry out deliveries for his family shop and takes "a long dangerous journey through the wilderness to the distant villages of Hampstead and Highgate along the course of rivers like The Fleet."

"It's incredible that only 200 years ago that really is what it was like."

Ultimately, Said writes the stories he would most want to read himself.

"My characters always appear to be young, powerless and lost in a dark and dangerous world, but begin to realise they they have powers they can use to change that world. I seem to write that story again and again. It's important we believe we have the power to do the things we dream of doing."

Another ambition was to write a "classic page turner children's adventure with main characters who happen to be Muslim."

"It's not what the book is about but there they are. I never had the experience of seeing myself reflected in a book and it would have meant so much to me. I wanted to make space for everyone to be able to imagine they could be the heroes of that story."

And there is a philosophical bent to the book as Tyger teaches the children a fresh way to see the world.

"You could boil down all the problems in this world to the way we think about ourselves as completely isolated and cut off from each other. If we think of ourselves as fundamentally connected and dependent on each other, we tend to make much better decisions. My books are always interested in how should we think in a way that might help us deal with problems in a better way."

Alison Hammond has also been shortlisted for best non fiction (ages 9-12) children's book for Black in History. (Image: PA)

He says it's "wonderful" to be shortlisted for the award. In an industry where children's books account for 30 per cent of the market, but receive just 3 per cent of book review space, "awards are the only occasion you get a bit of coverage."

"In the absence of coverage and reviews how are readers supposed to find their way through 10,000 titles published a year? At least on a list of 10 books everybody will find something they like."

Besides he dislikes the distinction between adult and children's books: "The books that we call children's books are written for an audience that includes children but excludes no-one. All the best children's books are great muliti-dimensional books everyone can enjoy. I try and make mine as accessible as possible so people of whatever age can read them."