After more than 200 books don’t tell me who I can write about

For a writer from a diverse background, co-creating with an established writer can provide the opportunity to be read more widely and increase their chance of publication. I have been invited to collaborate on books in this kind of partnership several times in the past, but now find myself being accused, as the established writer, of “taking over” and exploiting a culture to which I do not belong.

This is all the more absurd due to the fact I was an early creator of multicultural and gender-diverse characters in my children’s fiction before those terms were even used. Often, such as in the series Hijabi Girl, which I began co-writing with librarian Ozge Alkan at her invitation in 2014, there are student characters from different cultures in the one story and Muslim culture isn’t the major emphasis. Diversity is. Turkish Melek is Muslim, Tien is Vietnamese, Zac is Australian-born and Abdul is Sudanese.

Often writers are ahead of social issues. In 2010, Ryan Kennedy, who is a transguy, asked me to co-write f2m: The Boy Within. (The term ftm, for female to male, was in use then, although now the appropriate term is transguy.) Ours was the first young-adult novel co-written by a female to male trans person. I know it has saved many lives because people have contacted Ryan to tell him, and begun many family discussions.

In Misfit (1989), Crystal is a non-Jew in a Jewish school where boys wear black lids to keep their brains in. Customs and kosher food were researched as my children went to a Jewish school but our family is not Jewish. SkinZipped (2021) is about a sunburnt girl whose skin peels off and she becomes see-through. Indirectly, it tackles issues of colour prejudice.

There’s a difference between being didactic and telling an involving story which enables the reader to become immersed in that world for its length and come out a little more tolerant at the end. If we narrow eligibility to write only stories which are mainly autobiographical material, that’s a one-book-author career. Only memoirs will be available.

“Sensitivity readers” have been getting lots of work. I was recently asked to fill in an academic questionnaire on whether and when I used them. Certainly, I use a “naive” reader for story and an “expert” reader to check facts, but I prefer to do my cultural research before writing. Not after.

It’s hard to estimate the indirect censorship because some titles are just “left off” recommended lists or ignored. Apprehensive about criticism, publishers reject on title alone. The first Hijabi Girl book had 41 rejections before being picked up.

In the current climate, it seems science fantasy satire is the only “safe” way for an author to portray a culture other than their own. My current work in progress is an asylum seeker/refugee/climate change political satire in the vein of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I’ve researched with my bio-scientific medical experts and my asylum-seeker contacts. I still expect criticism.

Perhaps, instead of critics sniping on social media at an author who has for decades tried to represent the diversity in our society in her children’s books, people could send more fun fan mail, like one I received last week. “Dear Hippopotamus, don’t you think you should stop eating cake?”