English Literature: exploring identity at school At a recent local charity event, I met award-winning author and fellow Brent resident Zadie Smith and was struck about what she had to say about her early influences. A voracious reader from an early age, she stressed how important it was to her as a child to read about black people and to see illustrations. Margaret Busby, the UK's youngest and first Black female publisher, related similar experiences to me: "I had my whole school and university curriculum without having to read a single black author. Anything I knew about black literature and black writers was in my own time, not on my curriculum. "Things have changed quite a bit, but certainly not enough," she continued. There's a lot more that could be done to make the curriculum more inclusive. Personally, I enjoyed reading Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Bronte sisters, Dickens and Shakespeare, but I did long for a broader range of texts. The few texts we studied that discussed other cultures or races did so from the position of "otherness" - outsiders such as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird reflect the way other cultures and races were mainly presented to us. Authorial intention cannot compensate when such a very limited world-view is offered to young people. As one former student from Ealing put it to me: "We had The Color Purple and To Kill A Mocking Bird; more than enough racism for my tastes." It underlined how often reading about other cultures was underscored in this way within our education system. Understanding the past is important, but having contemporary literature that portrays today's society - in its multicultural, more egalitarian form - is vital too. As a young person from a dual heritage background trying to establish my own identity, engaging with a narrow base of literature did little to help. There is so much great literature that deals with other cultures that we rarely have access to in schools, from British authors such as Zadie Smith's White Teeth to great Caribbean authors like Samuel Selvon and Derek Walcott. Reflecting on his dual African - European heritage in a Caribbean background, Walcott's powerful discussions of identity "divided to the vein" were the first time that I fully engaged with this element in a work of literature. I was introduced to Walcott when I studied English Literature at university but I could have appreciated his poetry at an earlier age had the syllabus been broader. "English" literature that excludes writing of the calibre of the Walcotts and Smiths not only ignores a large part of modern society but sells young people short. As the new curriculum seems to encourage a broader range of authors by removing prescribed lists, I only hope that schools will embrace this. Rozina Sabur tweets @RozinaSabur Check out the Telegraph's Student Life section