#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
S. M. Wilson lives on the west coast of Scotland with her fiancé and two sons. Her day job is as a nurse in public health – and her dream job is writing fiction. Her love of YA fiction started as a teenager and has never stopped. She wrote The Infinity Files to try and infect her sons with the same love of reading that she has – watch out, she’s hoping it’s contagious!
Aleema Omotoni is an award-winning British-Nigerian author. She writes novels that centre Black teens coming of age, falling in love, and navigating all kinds of contemporary and fantasy worlds. She loves musical theatre, astrophysics and rainy Autumn days. Her debut novel, EVERYONE’S THINKING IT, won the 2024 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Youth/Teens.
Jan Dunning studied English and art at university, where she set her heart on a career with words and pictures. The plot took an unexpected twist, however, when she was scouted at Glastonbury festival and became an international fashion model instead. Jan spent the next decade striding down the runway, flying around the world on photo shoots and startling her friends and family on billboards for Gucci, Garnier and Gap. Finally realising she had more to say behind the camera, Jan trained as a photographer and art teacher and began writing fiction. She lives with her family in Bath, dreaming up ideas in the studio at the bottom of her garden, with help from Misty, her cat.
About Their Books:
Title: THE INFINITY FILES
Author: S. M. Wilson
Pitch: Ash Yang, who dreams of becoming a star fighter pilot, is instead chosen as the new Guardian of a library like no other – and with a far greater battle on her hands.
Find on Goodreads.
Title: EVERYONE’S THINKING IT
Author: Aleema Omotoni
Pitch: Nigerian cousins Iyanu and Kitan are students at Wodebury Hall, an elite English boarding school where reputation is everything. When polaroids are splashed across the school with everyone’s juicy secrets written on them, both girls must unravel the mystery of who released them, but the truth will change them forever.
Find on Goodreads.
Title: THE LAST THING YOU’LL HEAR
Author: Jan Dunning
Pitch: Musical siblings Wren and Lark are rivals first and sisters second – so when mysterious music producer Adam arrives in their hometown seeking performers for much-hyped new festival Enrapture, the game is on to impress. But Enrapture isn’t everything it seems… A contemporary Pied Piper retelling about power, influence, and obsession.
Find on Goodreads.
What do you think is special about UKYA?
S. M. Wilson: The range. No matter what your likes and dislikes, there is a YA book out there for you.
Aleema Omotoni: For me it feels like home. From my experience as a writer, it’s such a close community that helps to uplift each other, and as a reader it represents so much of my particular British experience as a young adult.
Jan Dunning: I think the UKYA scene has never been more exciting! There have been so many incredible books published in recent years, and I think we are fortunately starting to see more diversity and inclusion in the range of voices, stories and authors coming through. There is something unique and immediately identifiable about UKYA fiction – for me, it’s a just a little edgier and a little less commercial than YA from elsewhere, and I love that. On top of this, the UKYA community (including readers, reviewers, librarians, booksellers, bloggers etc) is just a vibrant and wonderfully supportive community and I love being part of it.
What distinguishes a YA book from middle grade or adult? Why do you think it’s so popular at the moment?
S. M. Wilson: For me it’s the tone. YA books can have more subtlety that isn’t so obvious in middle grade, allowing the reader to read between the lines and pick up on hints that don’t work well in middle grade.
Aleema Omotoni: YA is a great space to explore the heightened emotions of life no matter your age. Readers and writers are able to delve into the confusing experiences, moments of joy and sadness, things that can feel too complicated to wrap your head around in real life and much more. There’s just something so expansive about YA that facilitates that. It’s hard to explain, because MG and Adult have their own ways of exploring the same things, but YA feels universal in a way I think is special.
Jan Dunning: For me, good YA fiction encapsulates the fears and joys, the highs and lows of being in your teenage years. It’s a time when the world is opening up for you – and that’s exciting and terrifying all at once! It’s also an incredibly rich time for an author to write about. I know for me, it doesn’t take much to bring back all those feelings and channel them into my writing. In both my books, my main characters are trying to figure out who they truly are, and accept the answer – even celebrate it. I think this process of self-discovery is a universal experience, something we all go through, so it will never stop feeling relevant and YA readers will always seek out books that address this.
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?
S. M. Wilson: I think we have to trust the readers. People read what they want to read no matter what their age is – and have done since I was a child. If the themes, tone or content of a book isn’t for them, the likelihood is they will put it down and find something else.
Aleema Omotoni: I do think there’s a need for younger YA books. It’s difficult because there’s this idea that young readers tend to “read up”, so main characters that are older than them, and that’s fair. But I also think there does need to be a bridge between MG and older YA books. It’s so important that we don’t lose readers at such a crucial stage in their lives. At the end of the day YA is for young people and they should be a priority. But as I mentioned before, a lot of really great YA is universal, even if it reads a bit too young for adults, I think the heart of YA is the ability to feel truthful no matter the age of the reader.
Jan Dunning: I feel quite strongly that we need to do better for younger teens; readers between the ages of, say, 11-15, who have grown out of middle grade but are not yet ready for some of the more adult themes of older YA. Both my books fall roughly into this category, and we have some amazing UK authors writing in the Teen space, people like Sara Barnard, Tamsin Winter and Simon James Green, just off the top of my head – so it disappoints me that fewer Teen books are commissioned, that they’re widely perceived not to sell as well, and that hardly any bookshops have dedicated Teen shelves. The recent success of TV adaptations for Holly Smale’s and Alice Oseman’s books shows us that there’s a huge need and demand for Teen stories, so I would love to see Teen books in the UK given more visibility, more promotion, and a dedicated category of their own.
How do you think UKYA will evolve in the coming five years?
S. M. Wilson: Murder mysteries and horror are becoming more popular and I love that. I think we’ll see more diversification in UK stories and I welcome that too.
Aleema Omotoni: Gosh… I’m not sure. I’m never really good at predicting these kinds of things. I just hope we get more and more rich and diverse stories across the broad spectrum of young people’s experiences.
Jan Dunning: I honestly have no idea, I just hope I’m still writing for this audience because I truly love it! I guess I’d love to see more development of the Teen space, as I said before, and I definitely hope we continue to see more diverse stories and writers breaking through, as that’s so enriching for everyone. Personally, I also love a satisfying stand-alone story, so I wouldn’t be bothered to see less series fiction being published! I think generally, it would be fantastic if UKYA novels received the same level of attention as YA books and authors from the US, so I’d love to see more investment in strong UK voices, settings and experiences, whatever they may be.
For more interviews, check here and don’t forget to check instagram (here) for book recommendations from these authors and more!
#UKYASpotlight 
Leave a comment