Image source, Anna Moskalkova
- Author, Bea Swallow
- Role, BBC News, Gloucestershire
An Indian-born writer who has been awarded an MBE says her work “became a way of expressing [her] background”.
Jamila Gavin has lived in Stroud, Gloucestershire, for 30 years, but was born in India in the 1940s before India was granted independence.
She has been recognised for her contributions to Children’s Literature, writing more than 50 novels, plays and short stories spanning 40 years.
“I felt there really was a need to write the sort of stories that children from different ethnic backgrounds would like to see themselves featured in,” Ms Gavin said.
‘Representation matters’
Ms Gavin was born in the foothills of the Himalayas to her Indian father and English mother, who met as teachers in Iran. By the age of 11, the family had settled in Ealing, west London.
She told BBC Radio Gloucestershire that she only began writing in her late thirties after being inspired by a shocking story.
“I’d heard a teacher on the radio in the 1970s talking about having asked her children in a primary school to paint their self portraits,” she said.
“All the white children painted themselves white, but all the black and brown children also painted themselves white, and I felt very concerned about this.
“It meant they weren’t seeing their mirror image in books, or indeed anywhere around them. In those days if you walked into a library you’d hardly ever see a black or brown face on the books jackets.”
Her award-winning children’s books, aimed at ages six to 16, reflect her childhood in India and explore poignant themes of multi-culturalism, slavery, orphanage and the partition of India.
She says “representation matters”, and any experiences which children suffer should also be experiences they can read about.
Ms Gavin inherited two cultures which ran side by side throughout her life, and said she always felt she belonged to both countries.
“It became a way of me expressing my background and what interested me about my own heritage,” she said.
On being awarded an MBE, she told BBC Radio Gloucestershire: “I’m feeling very good about it I have to say, but I’m also getting teased about the Empire bit.
“I’ve been pointing out that I was actually born when the British Empire was still in existence, so I think technically, I was already a member.”
