3 min readMay 14, 2026 03:51 PM IST
First published on: May 1, 2026 at 08:21 AM IST
As a child of British-Indian heritage growing up in Wembley in the 1990s, Sanchita Basu De Sarkar–one of the judges for the inaugural Children’s Booker Prize 2027–learned to look for herself between the lines of British children’s classics, and found fragments: a maharaja in Tintin or a servant speaking broken English in Enid Blyton.
“As I filled up with stories, I understood a strange and unspoken truth,” she wrote in an opinion piece for The Guardian in 2018. “Brown children did not go on adventures.”
Now the owner of Children’s Bookshop in Muswell Hill, London–the oldest running children’s bookshop in the United Kingdom, according to the Royal Society of Literature, which made her an honorary fellow in 2024, Sarkar is in a position to change that for the next generation.
In an interview with Asian Voice published in June 2024, Basu De Sarkar described her British-Indian heritage central to how she runs her shop, and she has worked towards moving towards authentic representation.
Minorities in children literature
Progress has been made since her childhood, but the latest data shows the industry is still struggling to maintain momentum. According to the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education’s 8th annual Reflecting Realities report, published in November 2025, the proportion of children’s books featuring racially minoritised characters stood at 17% in 2024, a modest increase from 11% in 2023, but well below the peak of 30% reported in 2022.
There is one bright spot, the CLPE report said: characters from racially minoritised backgrounds as main protagonists reached 24% in 2024, the highest figure recorded in the report’s eight-year history, which is a sharp increase from just 7% in 2023.
She has also questioned the kinds of stories that do reach children of colour. Too many, she argued in her piece in The Guardian, focus on trauma and migration, raising the question whether brown children might also deserve the occasional comic misadventure or a journey through a wardrobe.
She is “thrilled” to be a judge in a panel that includes children. “Children make for the most passionate and opinionated readers,” she said in the statement. “Whenever we sit down and discuss books together, I’m always gaining new perspectives.”
Basu De Sarkar is also a co-founder of Sail Fest, an organisation that promotes South Asian children’s writers and illustrators in the UK, and sits on the Children’s Laureate Steering Group.
Children's Booker Prize 2027 judge, Sanchita Basu De Sarkar. (Source: Booker Prize Foundation) 
Share
