#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
Joanna Nadin is the Sunday-Times-bestselling author of more than a hundred books for children, young people and adults, including the Carnegie-nominated YA novels Everybody Hurts, A Calamity of Mannerings, and Joe All Alone, which is now a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. Her latest YA novel is My Teeth in Your Heart.
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Polly Crosby grew up on the Suffolk coast, and now lives with her husband and son in the heart of Norfolk. Polly writes dystopian fantasy YA. Her first novel for teens, This Tale is Forbidden, came out earlier this year with Scholastic, and her next is due out in January 2025. Polly also writes gothic historical mysteries for adults. In 2018, she won Curtis Brown Creative’s Yesterday Scholarship, which enabled her to finish her debut novel, The Illustrated Child. Later the same year, she was awarded runner-up in the Bridport Prize’s Peggy Chapman Andrews Award for a First Novel. Polly received the Annabel Abbs Creative Writing Scholarship at the University of East Anglia.
Tia Fisher spent her youth reading everything she could lay her hands on and writing poems about sad things. After being expelled from boarding school and dropping out of university, she had a bewildering variety of jobs – from TV presenter to artists’ model – before finding her happy place working in a children’s library in London and writing stories for young people. In her fifties, they let her go back to uni, and she behaved herself sufficiently to get a master’s degree in writing for young people. She likes a bit of gritty reality, and her debut verse novel Crossing the Line (about county line child exploitation) picked up the 2024 Yoto Carnegie Shadowers’ Choice medal and the 2024 UKLA teen award. Tia writes books for the teenage rebel who still lives inside her.
About Their Books:
Title: MY TEETH IN YOUR HEART
Author: Joanna Nadin
Pitch: A sweeping romance set in war-torn Cyprus in 1974, when 17-year-old Anna falls into the arms of Greek Cypriot George, and current-day Cambridge when her granddaughter Billy finds out the man she’s been calling ‘Grandpa’ isn’t.
Find on Goodreads.
Title: THIS TALE IS FORBIDDEN
Author: Polly Crosby
Pitch: A dystopian fantasy with shades of the Brothers’ Grimm and The Handmaid’s Tale
Find on Goodreads.
Title: CROSSING THE LINE
Author: Tia Fisher
Pitch: When Erik’s dad dies, he has to step up to be man of the house. But when he tries to earn some easy money, he gets caught up in a world of drugs and violence. A powerful story about impossible choices, told in verse.
Find on Goodreads.
What do you think is special about UKYA?
Joanna Nadin: I love the breadth of genres, which can appeal to an international audience, as well as the particularly British references that mark us out.
Polly Crosby: I think UKYA authors are influenced by other British authors and their books through their own childhood and teenage years. This to me was a time when books really stuck chimed me, helping to form who I have become. A UKYA book doesn’t have to be set in the UK, but there is something about the way we as British authors see the world, and how it weaves into our stories. This Tale isn’t set in the UK, but it has echoes of the British versions of fairytales I grew up with, along with hints of Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopian novel, the Handmaid’s Tale.
Tia Fisher: UKYA books really amplify the pulse of our young people: warm, passionate, inclusive, independent-thinking and eclectic. The YA writing community is pretty much like that too, and we all cheer each other on. I love it!
What distinguishes a YA book from middle grade or adult? Why do you think it’s so popular at the moment?
Joanna Nadin: YA novels are written ABOUT and also FOR teenagers, unlike the many adult novels that happen to have a teenage protagonist. They’re right there in the middle of the experience of adolescence, not looking back with adult eyes.
Polly Crosby: To me, a YA book should have a teenage protagonist, and should deal with the kind of stuff young people have to deal with. It should be urgent, pacy and a joy to read. We all find reading harder nowadays, adults too, with so many distractions around us.
Tia Fisher: UKYA books are brave and challenging and experimental, in a way that perhaps adult and MG is not allowed to be. YA books reflect the joys, the certainties, the questions, the extreme pain and confusion of that age, and perhaps we’re allowed to take more risks than adult or MG? But apart from self-discovery, books are places to escape and find comfort and young people will find that solace in YA fantasy and romance too.
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?
Joanna Nadin: I miss the distinction between teen books (11-13) and YA (14+) and hope we see this coming back more to combat this issue.
Polly Crosby: This Tale is actually aimed at a 12+ audience, as I think there can be a big jump between middle grade and YA, and I wanted to bridge that gap. Teens grow up at different rates, and not every teenager wants to read the same thing. As an adult, I still love reading YA. Most of us still feel sixteen years old at heart! is no upper age limit to read YA.
Tia Fisher: Ah. A favourite topic of mine, especially when I try to guide children in the library where I work. I think publishers and booksellers need to create a clear teen space and populate it with great reads that reflect the lives and concerns of 11-14 year olds.
How do you think UKYA will evolve in the coming five years?
Joanna Nadin: I hope we’ll see a revival of teen, as well as a delineation between YA and New Adult.
Polly Crosby: I don’t think anything is predictable in publishing! I’d love to see more graphic novels aimed at a YA and even adult audience. I also love the idea of novel apps, where you are involved in the decision making of a story, or simply where the novel is fully immersive. There are a few out now, but as tech gets ever more superior, and more great writers come aboard, I think this could be really fun!
Tia Fisher: See my answer above! What genre will come next after fantasy and thriller/mystery, I don’t know. But I suspect that visual storytelling – graphic novels and formatted verse – will continue to rise in popularity.
For more interviews, check here and don’t forget to check instagram (here) for book recommendations from these authors and more!
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