About the Authors
Alexia Casale is a novelist, script consultant & dramaturg. She is also Course Leader of the renowned MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University, which now offers a fully- online pathway to increase access and inclusion. The Bone Dragon (Faber&Faber) was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and Jugendliteraturpreis; it was a book of the year for the FT and Independent. House of Windows is part of the NHS/Wellcome Trust ‘books on prescription’ scheme to support young people’s mental health. Her first adult novel – The Best Way to Bury Your Husband – will be a lead title for Viking UK and US, publishing 14 March 2024.
Anna Waterworth is an author of Young Adult and Middle Grade novels. She lives in the North East of England with her partner, three children, and two cats, and works as a Clinical Psychologist. She has been writing since she was old enough to hold a pen, but was first noticed by Chicken House in the 2015 Times/Chicken House writing competition. Anna writes under several pen names including Anna Rainbow and Anna Day, and has been published in 24 countries and nominated for several awards.
Tasha Harrison is the author of middle grade comedy Clementine Florentine and YA romcom The Thing About Lemons. A copywriter and former magazine sub-editor, she has an incurable weakness for puns, rhymes and alliteration. She lives in Brighton with her family and food-obsessed Labrador.
About Their Books:
Title: SING IF YOU CAN’T DANCE
Author: Alexia Casale
Pitch: When an aspiring dancer loses her mobility in her teens, she pours her ambition & take-no prisoners stubbornness into sorting out her high school’s atrocious choir. There’s just one hitch – getting the rest of the choir, including gorgeous-but-infuriating new boy, on board.
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Title: THE GIRL WHO GREW WINGS
Author: Anna Waterworth
Pitch: A feminist re-imagining Icarus; to save her sister from the Underworld, Icari must grow wings and fly in the face of the devil himself.
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Title: THE THING ABOUT LEMONS
Author: Tasha Harrison
Pitch: Ori kisses her BFF’s boyfriend and finds all her fun summer plans cancelled. A road trip in France with her grandad is her only option.
Find on Goodreads.
What do you love most about writing for the YA audience?
Alexia Casale: So many things! In YA it’s so easy to cross genre boundaries as readers really welcome original takes, which gives the writer greater creative freedom. Also research shows that reading fiction has a huge impact on our ability to sympathise, empathise and understand other people, so I hope to write stories that help teens understand themselves, other people and the world at large in a way that lends itself to greater compassion for all our similarities and differences.
Anna Waterworth: I think young adults are amazing – so in touch with their emotions in a way most adults aren’t. I really connect with this and love being able to focus on emotions when I’m writing, it has an honesty to it I think.
Tasha Harrison: I love learning about the world current young adults and teenagers are navigating and comparing it to the era I grew up in – the 80s.
How has writing YA changed your perspective on the world?
Alexia Casale: It’s such a potent area of writing in terms of thinking about agency and how we can change ourselves, each other and the world for the better. Hope is so critical – a heartbeat beneath almost all YA stories – and also that sense of potential that no matter how difficult things are now, and how limited a teen’s power to change that, there are things can be improve now… and who knows what will come from those small changes now. I’m also inspired by how much people who write YA (and children’s fiction) care about their readers and making their craft good enough to tell the best stories possible.
Anna Waterworth: I think writing YA helps keep my sense of wonder. I think as adults, we can sometimes get a bit jaded and start taking things for granted. And we can get really caught up in the trappings of life and stuff that doesn’t really matter, like jobs and houses, new cars and keeping up with the Joneses. Writing YA helps me shed that boring adult skin and get back in touch with things that matter more, like love and friendships and the natural world.
Tasha Harrison: I think there’s so much that older generations can learn from younger generations and vice versa. It’s so important to stay open minded to change and how younger people see the world.
What trends are you most excited about in UKYA at the moment and to come?
Alexia Casale: There’s amazing stuff happening in YA thrillers and YA verse novels at the moment, but one of the most exciting things for me is being able to write a romcom like Sing where the protagonist just happens to be disabled but the book’s not about that. When we no longer talk about ‘diverse books’ as if they’re a separate category, but there is diversity across all our genres and forms and types of story and that’s just so normal it doesn’t even bear noting, we’ll really have achieved something wonderful.
Anna Waterworth: UKYA fantasy is amazing at the moment, and I’m really excited Greek mythology is shining so brightly at the moment. I’ve also started to see spooky stories and horror make a come back, which really appeals to my dark heart.
Tasha Harrison: I hope there’ll be more comedy in UKYA. Funny books are underrated in what they can bring to our lives.
What do you think is special about UKYA? (Books and/or community)
Alexia Casale: The humour, of course! Another thing I love about UKYA is that there’s often a good understanding that one person’s normal isn’t another person’s, whether that’s what’s for dinner or how easy it is to afford a new outfit. We’re a multicultural society and that shines particularly brightly in our YA. Leading the MA Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University, I also get to appreciate how much everyone cares about books for children and young people, whether it’s reading them or writing them or talking about them. There’s so little snobbery – and in its place is a great well of curiosity and compassion.
Anna Waterworth: It has such a supportive online community and I love that. I suffer with long covid and so find it hard to get to real life events to meet bloggers, readers and other authors, so I’ve really appreciated connecting with people on line.
Tasha Harrison: I think UKYA stood its ground when publishers lost faith in the market a few years back – and now it’s back and growing in strength and diversity.
#UKYASpotlight 
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