If you’ve come here for more information about Turning Point, the November conference on Young Adult Fiction, scroll down to see the main two entries. There’s been no official publicity yet, just emails, but we’ve had a steady stream of bookings. This month, the conference was awarded an ‘Arts For Everyone’ grant, which is great news. For a start, it means that we’ll be able to pay the writers properly. I’ve been holding off contacting more novelists about appearing until I knew the result of the grant application. Now I’m holding off because everybody in publishing seems to be on holiday until next week (and our administrator’s on holiday until the week after), but I’m open to offers…Stop Press: Kevin Brooks, author of the excellent…

Young Adult Fiction is one of the most important areas of publishing, for reasons discussed below , Yet the UK has no conferences specifically devoted to it. There’s a lack of critical discussion and even awareness of what YAF is. In particular, many readers fail to recognise that there is a large subsection of YA fiction that is aimed at readers chronologically aged 13 or 14+ rather than at 11+s with a reading of 14 are more. YAF writers are often a small add-on to children’s book conferences rather than an integral part of them. Although YAF is emerging as an important area of academic study, there are no academic conferences devoted to it there either. That’s why, earlier this year, when I got a…

Tomorrow, I’ll be one of the guests on the Jeremy Vine show, appearing at 1PM to promote and discuss The eBay book. As part of the show, I’ve set up an auction for the tie that Jeremy is wearing on today’s show. I’ve just been emailed two digital photos of Jeremy wearing the tie, so I’ve begun the auction listing process…. OK, after resizing the photos, I’ve got eBay to accept them. Any moment now, the auction will be live. You can go straight to it by clicking the link here. This auction is in aid of the BBC’s official charity, Children In Need. You can listen to the show live and hear it for up to a week afterwards by clicking on this link.…

I was watching the ‘Imagine’ documentary about Children’s Literature last night. Alan Yentob more than once referred to the ‘blurring’ of the boundaries between children’s fiction and adult fiction without once mentioning that there are writers working specifically in the zone between the two. The area that I mainly write in is called ‘Young Adult’ fiction (YAF) in order to differentiate itself from children’s fiction. YAF has been around for at least thirty years, yet many people are unaware that it exists. To be fair to Yentob, Malorie Blackman, who writes at the younger end of YAF, was given a couple of minutes, while Melvin Burgess, at the older end, got a couple of snippets in a 50 minute show. These ratios accurately reflect the…

Now that The eBay book is making its way in the world alone and England are out of the footy, my stress levels are down. I can’t think of many better ways to spend a summer evening than listening to the new Wilco album while investigating the joyous thing that is issue thirteen of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. This is a huge poster of a comic with a free, beautifully bound 264 page hardback book of top quality comic art and articles. I’d heard of McSweeney’s for years but, until the last issue, edited by Michael Chabon, it wasn’t published in the UK and cost an extortionate amount to subscribe to, so I read the online version (which is fun) instead. You unwrap the poster sized…