Malorie Blackman on receiving 82 rejection letters from publishers
Desert Island Discs

Malorie Blackman on receiving 82 rejection letters from publishers

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 25, 20263 min
  • Interview
  • Arts & culture

The writer Malorie Blackman was cast away by Kirsty Young in 2013. Although she has published more than 70 books for children and young adults - among them her hugely popular Noughts and Crosses series - getting her start as a published author was hard - 82 rejection letters had thudded onto her door mat before she had her first manuscript accepted for publication. She still remembers the day that 83rd letter arrived. You can listen to the full episode on BBC Sounds.

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0:00

Welcome to Desert Island Discs postcards. I'm Lauren Laverne. We've cast away thousands of people to our imaginary desert island, among them many writers. Today's cast away, Mallory Blackmon has written more than 70 books for children and young adults with her Norton Cross a series perhaps best known among them. But getting her first book published

0:33

was hard, she told Kirsty Young in 2013. When I was in my mid-twenties I had enough of computing and I thought okay what can I do and I tried acting classes for a while and that was a dead loss, absolute rubbish. But I used to come up with sort of scenarios for our improvisations and after a while it

0:54

was, oh Malorie what do you think we should do? So at the end of the course the two just said to me, um, Madam, have you ever thought about writing some of your ideas down? Because you came up with some really good ideas and that's how I started on my writing classes and kind of tried to get into it. So then when you wanted to take that step out of them, I'm sure a pretty

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