About the Authors
Gina Blaxill is the author of YA thrillers Love You to Death and You Can Trust Me, as well as the Tales at Midnight series of fairy tale retellings for younger teenagers and three other thrillers. As well as dishing up whodunnits that excite and thrill, she also aims to explore societal issues, especially feminist ones, in her writing. She lives in Essex with her family and two imperious cats.
A born and bred Londoner, Ravena Guron writes MG and YA, usually featuring antiheroines or snarky narrators. Growing up she always read the last page of books first, but discovering Agatha Christie in her early teens stopped that habit, igniting a love of twisty murder-mysteries with jaw-dropping endings the reader never saw coming. Ravena is a lawyer with a degree in biochemistry, and hopes to use the knowledge gained from her experiences to plot the perfect murder (for a book, of course!). In her spare time, Ravena enjoys hiking in the great outdoors (though nothing too mountainous because she’s very clumsy), baking cakes (that never rise) and falling asleep to her thousandth re-watch of Friends.
Diana Anyakwo grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. She is of mixed Irish and Nigerian heritage. She moved to the UK when she was a teenager and later graduated from the University of Manchester with a degree in Molecular Biology and a Masters in Bioreactor Systems. She spent three years in Athens, Greece where she taught English and worked as an editor at an educational publisher. She currently lives and works in Manchester as a freelance writer and editor of English Language teaching materials. She loves reading, writing, and binge-watching TV series. She also loves going for long walks to help get inspiration for her writing.
About Their Books:
Title: LOVE YOU TO DEATH
Author: Gina Blaxill
Pitch: Someone is obsessed with Mia Hawkins – someone very dangerous… A twisty whodunnit about stalking, obsession and toxic love.
Find on Goodreads.
Title: THIS BOOK KILLS
Author: Ravena Guron
Pitch: A scholarship student at an elite boarding school gets caught up in a murder investigation after the killer uses her short story for inspiration.
Find on Goodreads.
Title: MY LIFE AS A CHAMELEON
Author: Diana Anyakwo
Pitch: It’s a coming of age tale about a mixed race girl growing up in Nigeria. It’s a story about finding your place in the world and realising you deserve to be there.
Find on Goodreads.
What do you love most about writing for the YA audience?
Gina Blaxill: I am obsessed with schools and firsts and all of the intense transitions of being a teenager, so I very much enjoy reflecting that in my books as well as killer plots! My teenage years were (on reflection) pretty dull as I spent all of them with my nose in a book, so perhaps I’m living a more interesting (and murderous) version of them through writing. My characters are way cooler than I ever was though!
Ravena Guron: I love how incredibly passionate the YA audience is. For me, the books I read as a teenager were the books that shaped me – they are the books I most strongly remember reading. I feel incredibly lucky to now be an author getting to write those stories.
Diana Anyakwo: I love the fact I can explore themes and topics that most young adults will be able to relate to. I think being a young adult is such an exciting time and the experiences you have as a child and teenager inform who you become as an adult. I love the idea of young people seeing themselves in my stories and in that way feeling connected to others and less alone if they are going through something challenging.
How has writing YA changed your perspective on the world?
Gina Blaxill: I’m much more in tune with the issues and challenges facing younger people than I would otherwise be. It’s also made me weirdly more optimistic, despite the darkness of my books!
Ravena Guron: Meeting readers has made me see how positive the impact of seeing yourself in the characters you read can be. I recently did a school visit where one of the students told me how much they loved reading about a character who looked like them. It makes me reflect back on my own teenage years, where I didn’t ever see characters with the same background as me – or even more generally, characters who came from the UK, because a lot of what I was reading was YA from the US!
Diana Anyakwo: It’s broadened my ideas about young adults. I think writing YA has given me the opportunity to go back to a time when I was discovering who I wanted to be in the world and what I wanted to experience.
What trends are you most excited about in UKYA at the moment and to come?
Gina Blaxill: Thrillers are definitely having an extended moment and I’m very much here for that. I hope it lasts a long time without fatigue or overexposure setting in! I’m also pleased to see dystopia enjoying a comeback, and there are a number of romcoms coming out that reflect a greater range of romantic experiences.
Ravena Guron: I’m really loving all the YA thrillers coming out at the moment – I love writing them and I also love reading them! I need more, because once I start I can never put them down and I get through them quickly!
Diana Anyakwo: I’m excited by more contemporary fiction in YA. I’m also excited by the diversity of authors and genres that are out there now. I think we are going to see lots more exciting and original stories to come. YA is such a dynamic and genre to be involved in as it’s constantly changing and becoming more innovative.
What do you think is special about UKYA? (Books and/or community)
Gina Blaxill: British teenagers deserve to have stories which reflect the very unique experience of being a teenager in the UK. Perhaps because YA has been (and to an extent, still is) dominated by US titles, the UKYA Community has become very good at shouting about and championing its own books, and I love that.
Ravena Guron: I think the community is absolutely incredible – I feel so very lucky to have met so many passionate readers, booksellers, librarians and writers. I’ve made really close friends with some other UKYA authors and it’s so lovely to see how everyone lifts each other up.
Diana Ayakwo: I think the community is so warm and friendly, which has been wonderful as a debut author. UKYA fiction is so exciting with a huge mix of different genres available to meet many reader tastes.
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