Ashok Banker Books

All right, so I snuck my own debut picture book into this list! As a child of very mixed parentage – Irish-Portuguese-Sri Lankan-Indian – I grew up in a country (India) where there weren’t very many children like myself. And not a single book about children like me. It was okay. I grew up loving books and reading and still do. I even grew up to make a living from books! I moved to the USA a few years ago, and had the great pleasure of seeing my own grandchild, whom I spend most of my daytime hours with now. She’s even more mixed than I am: apart from all my ancestry, she’s also Belgian on her mother’s side. She’s white like her mum and I’m brown, like her dad, and we’re a family of many colours, races, faiths, cultures, nationalities. But the one thing we all have in common is that children are children. And childhood is the most wonderful, magical time of our lives. It’s the greatest adventure we have and the happiest celebration of life itself. I AM BROWN captures the variety and diversity of children everywhere, whatever their nationality, creed, culture, race, religion (or lack of it), or identity. They just happen to be brown just as all the children in the books I grew up reading (and still love reading) just happen to be white. Because children are children and deserve to be celebrated!