JENNIFER BYRNE
Hello. I'm Jennifer Byrne, and tonight's special is about that book industry colossus — young adult fiction. Now, anyone who's walked into a bookstore in recent years will know that teen titles dominate the front of the shop, with bestsellers from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games walking out of the stores, often under the arms of grown-ups, who are finding young adult, or YA, fiction increasingly appealing. It's also getting darker, tackling tough, once-taboo themes and nightmarish futures. How did this happen? How did this tiny niche expand into the global phenomenon it is today? We've brought together some top Australian writers in the field to find out. Starting with John Marsden — thinker, educator and author of the highly successful Tomorrow, When The War Began series. Steph Bowe is a huge YA reader who wrote her first book, Boy Saves Girl… no, it was Girl Saves Boy, when she was just 15 years old. Good on you. Melina Marchetta — her first novel, Looking For Alibrandi, was a runaway hit, which she's followed up with four other highly successful books and a fantasy series. And, finally, Morris Gleitzman — he used to write for Norman Gunston, he now writes books for young readers, the latest being the Felix series which is set during the Holocaust. Won't you please make them all welcome? Now, the relative newness of the whole phenomenon of YA fiction I think is established by the fact at least two of you, John and Morris, and maybe even you, Melina, when you were growing up, it didn't even exist. Is that right?
MORRIS GLEITZMAN
It certainly wasn't called that. I think teenagers have always found certain books that have spoken to them partly because of where they're at in their lives. And, I guess, for me, it was some of the classics like Holden Caulfield was somebody who spoke to me. Although I don't know that JD Salinger necessarily was writing for a demographic that's been identified in the way that it has today.
JENNIFER BYRNE
But apart from that — that was a book you went and found yourself, and I think you said it was…
JOHN MARSDEN
Yeah, it was a big book for me. Holden Caulfield spoke loudly to me.
JENNIFER BYRNE
But there was children's books — we all knew that — and then there were adult books, but there was no category, is that right?
MELINA MARCHETTA
Well, I know that I didn't think there was a category because when I submitted Alibrandi I just didn't know that it had to go into a particular department and it just got sent to Penguin at the end and I think it…
JENNIFER BYRNE
But it started off as a kids' book, didn't it?
MELINA MARCHETTA
No, no, no.
JENNIFER BYRNE
Puffin, I thought.
MELINA MARCHETTA
Well, it was published as a Puffin book, and then what happened was, a year later, because a lot of adults were complaining that it was an adult book and it should be an adult book, a year later — I think it was about a year — they published it as a Penguin book as well. So one was in one part of the bookstore, one was in the other, and one was $3 more expensive than the other. And I used to have people say, 'I almost didn't pick up your book because I don't go down to the children's section.' And I always thought, 'Great — you got charged $3 more for that.' But that was the first time I realised that there were these different areas. And that was in 1992.
JENNIFER BYRNE
You were growing up — you grew up with there being a young adult fiction. Is — let's be frank about it — is it just a marketing ploy? Is it a marketing construct? Or is there a need and a real demand for books specifically for that teen age group?
STEPH BOWE
You know, I think, as Morris said, teenagers have always found books that connect with them. And I think it's… Obviously it is a marketing ploy and publishers do want to make money, but there's definitely a need for those sorts of books for teenagers to relate to characters and to… the things that they're experiencing, to see those in books, yeah.
JOHN MARSDEN
For me, those books are very important, because I know, in my life, when I graduated from the children's books, which was almost an overnight thing — I reached adolescence and suddenly Enid Blyton and The Famous Five didn't do it for me anymore — and a lot of viewers of this program, I think, would probably be people who had that experience where they virtually stopped reading because they couldn't find anything to go to because the jump…
JENNIFER BYRNE
And that happened.
JOHN MARSDEN
Yeah, the jump from Enid Blyton to Thomas Hardy was too big and…
JENNIFER BYRNE
Some are still down the gully.
JOHN MARSDEN
Yeah, it's a big jump. And, for me, I was lucky because I found a group of books that were classified as adult books but they were really quite adolescent, and they were the ripping yarns of people like Hammond Innes and Desmond Bagley and Alistair MacLean, and that kind of filled the gap, so that by the time I got to 17 or 18, I hadn't lost the reading habit. Those people bridged that time for me — from childhood to adulthood.
MELINA MARCHETTA
But also, I think that young people are looking for themselves in other stories, and I know that when I was growing up there weren't… a lot of adult novels didn't feature a teenager or a child, so it's almost like we didn't exist. And I always think that my reason for writing was because I was reading so much, and I didn't exist in those stories. I loved reading, but I think it was kind of a very egotistical, 'I want to see a part of me', and I feel that, from the response of readers, they do love seeing a presence of young people and that's probably how it starts for them as readers.
JENNIFER BYRNE
Would you agree with that?
STEPH BOWE
Yeah, I think I'm lucky that I grew up when I did because I've been able to find a lot of books — and I've really enjoyed your books — where there are characters that I can relate to, you know, the loners and the weirdos and the people who are terrified and uncertain about the future and uncertain of who they are. And I think I was really drawn to YA over adult literary fiction because it lacks a lot of the pretence and a lot of the fatality that books for adults tend to have. Even if I'm reading it at an adult level, I'll be reading books for teenagers because there's a bit more positivity and there's characters that are still trying to figure out who they are.