Patrice Lawrence, the acclaimed author of young adult novels including Orangeboy, Indigo Donut and Needle and the picture book Is That Your Mama?, has been named the UK's new children's laureate. She succeeds Frank Cottrell-Boyce and joins a distinguished lineage that includes Jacqueline Wilson, Quentin Blake, Michael Rosen, Julia Donaldson and Malorie Blackman. Over her two-year term she plans to focus on reading as a source of belonging in what she describes as an increasingly fractured and socially divided Britain, aiming to reach children who are isolated from books.

Lawrence, 59, was born in 1967 to Trinidadian parents who came to Britain to train as nurses, and spent her early years privately fostered by a white working-class family in Brighton who introduced her to the local library. She published her debut, Granny Ting Ting, in 2009 and broke through with Orangeboy in 2016, aged 49, winning the Waterstones children's book prize and the Bookseller YA book prize. Having assumed as a child that children's books were written only by people who were "white and dead", she credits the 1999 BBC adaptation of Malorie Blackman's Pig-Heart Boy with changing her outlook. As laureate she intends to gather research from children in care, refugee families and the children of prisoners to demonstrate to policymakers how stories change lives.