#UKYASpotlight is a month-long event across social media to promote YA books by British and Irish authors (resident and national). For more information, click here.
About the Authors
Moira Buffini has worked in theatre, TV and film for many years as a playwright and screenwriter. Songlight is her first novel.
Clara Kumagai is from Canada, Japan and Ireland. Her fiction and non-fiction for children and adults has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Banshee and The Kyoto Journal. Her debut YA novel, Catfish Rolling (Zephyr, 2023), blends magical realism with Japanese myth in an original story about grief and memory. Catfish Rolling was nominated for the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Writing, a finalist for the 2023 Great Reads Award and won the 2023 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year Award.
About Their Books:
Title: SONGLIGHT
Author: Moira Buffini
Pitch: In the dystopian country of Brightland, Elsa, who lives in a coastal town and Kaira, from the city, both have a form of telepathy – songlight – which is persecuted. They try to help each other stay alive and find that their friendship becomes a force of powerful and transformative change.
Find on Goodreads.
Title: CATFISH ROLLING
Author: Clara Kumagai
Pitch: Sora hates the catfish whose rolling caused an earthquake so powerful it cracked time itself. It took her mother and created the time zones – places where time runs faster or slower than normal. But soon she will have to venture into these uncharted spaces, perhaps to find the catfish itself…
Find on Goodreads.
What do you think is special about UKYA?
Moira Buffini: It’s richly diverse and incredibly imaginative. I have really enjoyed meeting other authors, reading their work and finding it such a warm and mutually supportive world.
Clara Kumagai: I’m probably better able to answer this regards Ireland… I absolutely love the writing community here! Other authors have been so kind and supportive, which I appreciated a lot given that a debut year is full of newness and uncertainty. Ireland is of course smaller than the UK and has a different history of emigration, immigration and communities, so there are less diverse Irish YA books, but this is changing. I have been delighted to meet new authors who are writing novels for young people about racial and religious diversity, disabilities, queerness and gender identity.
What distinguishes a YA book from middle grade or adult? Why do you think it’s so popular at the moment?
Moira Buffini: Teenage characters are navigating the world as adults for the first time and their experiences are universal to us all and keenly felt. We have all gone through our own rites of passage. I think YA attracts older readers because we feel a connection with our younger selves and it attracts younger readers because they are on the cusp, looking for life lessons perhaps. Maybe the fantastical invented worlds of YA help us to see our own world more clearly.
Clara Kumagai: Very simply, I think YA has more darkness than middle grade and more hope than adult. I say ‘darkness’, but really I mean that there are more complex, serious and traumatic experiences that are explored in YA compared to middle grade. I think that’s necessary for young people to read, now more than ever. But at the same time, we do all need hope! So books that inspire that are important for a younger generation–and for us, who can see how young people are informed about the world and inspired to change it for the better.
There has been a lot of talk about the adultification of YA and what that means for teen readers. What sort of balance do you think UKYA strikes between teens and older readers? Do you think this balance needs to shift in a particular direction and how?
Moira Buffini: I have made no concessions in the writing of complex prose and in presenting a difficult world. I think teenage readers should never be underestimated. And I think they should be trusted. When I was growing up there was no YA (I’m pretty old) so I just read adult fiction – anything I could get my hands on, from Dostoyevsky to steamy Jackie Collins novels. I loved it all. It made the world feel bigger and I don’t think anything harmed me.
Clara Kumagai: I think this is a difficult balance to strike and a difficult line to draw between teens and older readers. To be quite honest, I’m not sure if I could identify where one starts and the other begins! I do think that YA has shifted according to the biggest buying demographic, which is adults, but the reason adults enjoy YA is because it’s dealing with themes of growing up and new experiences. So it seems a little counter-productive to change that! But I’m going to fall back on my answer when I can’t really understand trends like this: it’s probably down to the publishing industry and marketing.
How do you think UKYA will evolve in the coming five years?
Moira Buffini: I’m a newbie in this world so it’s hard to say. I hope it continues to become more diverse. It’s wonderful to see such an appetite for story and the written word.
Clara Kumagai: I have no idea how to predict trends so I won’t even try! But I hope to see a continued growth in diversity and representation of characters and subjects. I certainly hope that book banning does not take hold in the UK and Ireland, and I think we need to be ready to protect young people’s right to read widely and freely.
For more interviews, check here and don’t forget to check instagram (here) for book recommendations from these authors and more!
#UKYASpotlight 
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