Growing up I thought Filipinos weren't allowed to be in books

The BBC’s poll of the greatest children’s books of all time led to heartfelt objections on Twitter on beyond. Where was Judy Blume? Why were there no NEW books? What about Harry Potter? To appease those who were “slightly peeved” by these omissions, The Guardian held its own random Twitter poll, asking book lovers what children’s books would still be making their mark on future generations.

Well. I was peeved too, but for other reasons. Everyone seemed to forget that the poll was held to mark INTERNATIONAL Children’s Book Day.

Where was the international in a list of books that were equal parts American and British?

If you check out the extended list of 21, only The Little Prince (French) and Pippi Longstocking (Swedish) squeeze into the Anglo-American monopoly on “great”.

Did those book experts polled by the BBC only read children’s books in western cultures? Or was this a reflection of how little interest there is in translating books from elsewhere into English? I mean, are there really NO great children’s texts from outside Britain and America?

It’s particularly poignant to me. Growing up in the Philippines when there was little publishing, all the books I ever read and loved were imported from the United Kingdom or America, with pink-skinned characters and tidy settings that didn’t resemble my real life in unruly Manila. As a child, I took this in stride. I simply thought that Filipinos were not allowed to be in books.

Perhaps I’m being extra sensitive to this because I’m currently working on a keynote speech that I’ll be delivering in June at the Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC) in Singapore.

The blurb for my speech asks, “If books are mirrors and windows to the world, are the children of Asia well served?”

It’s a big ask – Asia has a multitude of ancient cultures such as China, Japan and India. It has the newer nations, like Singapore and my own native Philippines. And within each country there is diversity within diversity (publishing in the Philippines for example has always struggled with our multiplicity of languages – 175 living languages at last count on Wikipedia).

Setting aside Asia, there’s the rest of Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and all the other little bits of the world that, for lack of translation or interest, the BBC’s reviewers have yet to sample.

It’s not that the books listed are not great, I agree that they are. It’s just an unfortunate way to mark a day when we should be celebrating reading and readers from EVERYWHERE.

When I read the BBC list, I tweeted:

The Guardian invited me to suggest some future classics for an alternative list. It was my chance to suggest something embracing the International in International Children’s Book Day.

I desperately googled The Arabian Nights, surely the antidote to Western cultural domination.

But it turns out I couldn’t suggest the famous work (collected over many centuries by various authors and translators across West, Central, South Asia and North Africa) because it didn’t actually include the bits I’d read – Sinbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba, which were added by European translators.

To make things worse, a voice whispered in my ear, urging me to suggest all my favourite authors – Geraldine McCaughrean, Philip Reeve, Frank Cottrell Boyce – all English.

Guilty, guilty, guilty.

How could I accuse the BBC of anything when I myself had not made the effort to embrace books of cultures not my own?

So here’s the thing. We’ve all got to get out more. There are books out there still to be discovered. Great books. Let’s read them.

Yep. Books are mirrors and windows to the world – and it’s not a small world after all.

Candy Gourlay met her English husband in the Philippines during the 1986 revolution that overthrew the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. She has lived in London since 1989. Shine, her novel for teens, was nominated for the Guardian Children’s fiction prize 2014 – find out more on Candy’s website.