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Talking Enid Blyton and more with the new Famous Five author
Sufiya Ahmed reveals how she reimagined Blyton’s most popular series and what’s next for the Famous Five.
Sufiya Ahmed grew up loving Enid Blyton’s stories. She spent most of her free time in the public library, “the only place that my mother allowed me to be on my own”. “It was my favourite place, my safe and happy place, which gave me access to all those free books that I could devour,” she says.
Ahmed, who was born in Gujarat, arrived in the UK as a baby. Her mother moved to Bolton, Lancashire, a textile town, “where South Asian communities had settled after answering the call to rebuild Britain after the destruction of World War II”.
“When I was four, we moved to London and I’ve been a Londoner since,” says Ahmed says, who worked in advertising and the House of Commons before becoming a full-time author.
She recalls that her library stocked “the Famous Five adventures, and the boarding school series, Malory Towers and St Clare’s, which I absolutely loved”.
“Blyton’s books gave me so much pleasure, transporting me into worlds where mysteries were solved, adventures were experienced, and fantastical settings were explored. The escapism that grabbed me really and that made me a reader,” she says. “I started to dream about being a writer just like Blyton.”
Fast forward to years later, and Ahmed has written several children’s books, including My Story: Noor-Un-Nissa Inayat Khan, Secrets of the Henna Girl, Princess SophiaDuleep Singh, and Under the Great Plum Tree, which was longlisted for the UK Literacy Association Book Awards.
“I am now a full time writer with over 30 children’s books published,” says Ahmed, who set up BIBI Foundation, a non-profit that arrange visits to the Houses of Parliament for diverse and underprivileged school children.
Ahmed went on to give talks in schools as a published author, and Blyton was “up there on my presentation slide as an author who inspired me to become a writer”. So when she was asked, in 2022, if she would like to pen new adventures with the Famous Five characters, she grabbed the offer right away.
Her partnership with Hachette was to reimagine the Famous Five into modern Britain. The series, which began with a plan for four books, has now been extended to eight. Six of these have already been published: Timmy and the Treasure, Five and the Runaway Dog, Message in a Bottle, The Mysterious Noise, Five and the Missing Prize, and The Library Mystery.
“My adventures are for a slightly younger age group, 7-9 years, and include illustrations and a shorter word count to the originals. The settings and the main characters are the same. Julian still likes to play the leader, George is always challenging that leadership, Dick is still the funny one, and Ann the shy quiet one. Timmy the dog saves the day many times too,” she says. “I don’t really have a favourite character, but I do enjoy being creative with George and Dick’s sparring in my stories, and Timmy’s tendency to create chaos with his eagerness,” she adds.
On how she went about reimagining Blyton’s most popular series, Ahmed says she “re-read some of the originals to get a feel of the books again” and put pen to paper once she had worked out her own new plot. “The challenge, of course, was to make sure each character was true to the personality that Blyton had created,” she says.
Blyton, who believed that writing for children “is an art in itself, and a most interesting one”, wrote more than 700 books and 4,500 short stories. Her work has been translated into 90 languages, with more than 600 million copies of her books being sold.
However, even though her books were popular, as time passed, her stories came to be seen as “full of racism, sexism, class bias, and lacking merit”. The Famous Five – a series of 21 books, is one of Blyton’s most popular works – and the one most frequently cited for its sexism. The Five include two boys (Julian and Dick), two girls (Georgina and Anne), and a dog (Timmy), that belongs to Georgina. Julian, the oldest, is the assumed leader, while Anne the youngest, is written as a timid, highly domesticated girl. Georgina is a fearless tomboy who responds only to the name “George”.
In Five have a gender-ful time: Blyton, sexism, and the infamous five, David Rudd, a senior lecturer at Bolton Institute of Higher Education in the North West of England, writes: “The undermining of George’s independence is increasingly characteristic of the Five books, read in chronological order. By the time of Five Go to Demon’s Rocks (the nineteenth) George does not even raise her normal protest at being left out of an adventure (Chapter 20); remarkably, she doesn’t speak at all (even Anne speaks once!). She seems effectively silenced.”
Rudd also speaks up for Anne, who’s often come under criticism for her domesticated ways and dialogues: “I’ll just see what we’ve got in the larder, Julian”; “You’d never get your bunks made, or your meals cooked, or the caravans kept clean if it wasn’t for me!”; or “I’ll do the washing-up”.
“It would be wrong [to] belittle Anne’s behaviour, particularly as it still represents a reality for many women. Rather than ignoring it, Blyton’s books seem to engage in a dialogue about it – addressing it as an issue.”
Amid Blyton’s fall from grace, how did Ahmed aim to right past wrongs? How did she work on imbuing a much-loved franchise with inclusivity and diversity to help the characters fit into today’s world.
Ahmed says her new stories include a cast of characters that are more reflective of Britain today, for example, people of colour who live in Kirrin village are depicted in the illustrations. “A young reader sees the Britain they are familiar with, one that is multicultural and inclusive. I’ve included a South Asian girl called Simi in some of the stories and she appears on two front covers,” she says.
The author says new editions are also very sensitively updated, “changing words where the definition is unclear in context and therefore the usage is confusing, and where words have been used in an inappropriate or offensive sense – while retaining the original language as far as is possible and preserving the period and original setting that so many fans love”.
“Whether it’s the Five, the Secret Seven or the girls at Malory Towers, these are beloved characters. I’m just making the setting for the Famous Five adventures more reflective of the world that young readers live in, without changing the essence of their appeal. The Five still love the countryside and the coast, go camping on their island, and are good-hearted children who help their friends and neighbours, and, of course, are devoted to Timmy,” she says.
The year 2024 saw the release of Ahmed’s fifth and sixth Famous Five titles: The Library Mystery and Five and the Missing Prize. “The first is very special because of my own love for libraries. I am a campaigner for libraries as I believe the opportunities they provided for me a little girl should continue for others,” she says.
Two new titles are scheduled for a 2025 release: The Painting Puzzle and Trouble at the Farm. “Both were fun to write. We have an adorable new character in the latter. It’s a little duckling called Treacle, who I think our little Famous Five fans will love. In the Painting Puzzle, the five learn to break secret codes to help them solve a mystery,” she says.
The Famous Five remains one of Blyton’s most popular series. Last Christmas, the BBC, which had banned Blyton for almost three decades as a “second-rater” whose work lacked literary value, released Nicolas Winding Refn’s Famous Five reboot, which reimagines the stories with a mixed-race lead, outdated fashions, and synthetic score.
Ahmed may be writing the new Famous Five books, but her other work has also become popular. She speaks about her book on Noor-Un-Nissa Inayat Khan, one of Winston Churchill’s spies during WWII. “She was a great-great-great granddaughter of Tipu Sultan, and was a hero. I love that her life story is being shared through my book in British schools,” she says.
Khan’s story has also inspired her Rosie Raja series. “Rosie is a 11-year-old spy who subverts and sabotages the Nazis during WWII. Her mother is an Indian princess but has died, so Rosie is brought to live in England with her English father. The new book is called Rosie Raja Undercover Codebreaker and is set in 1942 at Bletchley Park, where codebreakers raced against time to break the German’s Enigma code,” she says. Alan Turing, who is credited with breaking Enigma, and Noor Inayat Khan, appear in the story. “I’ve also included Gandhi’s Quit India movement which was happening at the same time.”
Ahmed’s new series, Time Travellers, follows three children, Suhana, Mia and Ayaan, as they go back in time to witness moments in history that are not very well known.
“The first, Adventure Calling, was released in February 2024. The three time travellers find themselves in 1911 at a suffrage march in which Indian women are taking part. Mrs Lolita Roy was a suffragist whose face and name is engraved on a suffragist plaque in London’s Parliament Square, but whose story is not well known,” she says.
The second book in the series, Secrets and Spies, is scheduled for release on October 3rd 2025. This time, the trio spin back in time from Edinburgh Castle to end up in Seringapatam in 1799. “There they meet Tipu Sultan as he battles the East India Company’s soldiers. Some British schools teach the British Empire and this story ties in well with those lessons,” Ahmed says.
Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.
