Join Richard Lambert (The Republic of Dreams), Eva Wong Nava (The House of Little Sisters), and chair Joyce Chua (No Room in Neverland) as they share invaluable insights into their writing processes and publishing journeys. Together, they will explore the craft of character development, the balance between theme and storytelling, and the important role YA literature plays in young readers’ lives.

Supported by the National Arts Council of Singapore

Joyce Chua is the author of Lambs for Dinner (Straits Times Press, 2013), the Children of the Desert trilogy (Penguin Random House SEA, 2021), Until Morning, and No Room in Neverland (Penguin Random House SEA, 2023). She graduated from the National University of Singapore with a degree in English and is now a personal finance editor by day and author by night. She has spoken at various events including the Singapore Writers Festival and Asian Festival of Children’s Content. Her articles have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Her World, The Straits Times, and more. When not writing, she can be found on Instagram, TikTok and Threads at @joycechuawrites. 

Richard Lambert is a prizewinning writer of fiction and poetry. In 2020, his YA novel The Wolf Road was a book of the year in the Sunday Times, Guardian and Financial Times, longlisted for the Carnegie Award and won the Mal Peet Award. He has since published two novels for Middle Grade readers, Shadow Town and The Republic of Dreams, books of the year in the Times and Guardian respectively. 

Richard also writes general fiction; his stories have been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story award and won the Fish Short Story prize. He has published two poetry collections. His second, The Nameless Places, includes a sequence on the River Waveney Valley on the Suffolk-Norfolk border. From 2022-2024 he was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of East Anglia. He has an MA in Creative Writing from UEA, and has delivered more than 40 creative-writing workshops across the UK.   

Eva Wong Nava was born on a tropical island in the Southern Seas, where a merlion guards its inhabitants from marauding pirates. She has lived here, there and almost everywhere, but calls Londinium home, where she lives with a goat, tiger and dog. Eva’s debut YA Historical Fiction novel, The House of Little Sisters, was long listed for the McKitterick Prize in 2021, shortlisted for various literary awards, and it won the Firebird Book Awards in America for Best Historical Fiction in 2022. When not writing, she often visits schools to talk about covering challenging topics and representation in children’s books, and the importance of reading for pleasure. Find Eva on Instagram and Twitter/X @evawongnava.

Finding Ourselves Through YA Fiction transcript

JOYCE: Welcome, everyone, to the Meet the World panel discussion organised by the National Centre for Writing. I’m Joyce, the author of Land of Sand and Song and other titles. And here with me are two award-winning authors, Eva Wong Nava, author of The House of Little Sisters and other titles, and Richard Lambert, author of The Wolf Road and other titles. So, before we begin, let’s have Eva and Richard do a quick introduction of yourselves and your books and any special titbit of information that you would like us to know about you. Richard, would you like to start? 

RICHARD: Thanks, Joyce. Yeah. I’m Richard. I’ve had three novels published, The Wolf Road was the first one, which is definitely YA, and then two fantasy novels for the ages 11 to 14, a bit younger, but not quite middle grade, kind of in between. Those are the three that I’ve had published and they’re all kind of adventures, with suspense and drama, I suppose. That’s my YA writing. I do other kinds of writing, too, but that’s my YA stuff.  

JOYCE: And Eva? 

EVA: Thank you, Joyce, for moderating this. I’m Eva. I am a children’s book author, primarily a picture book author, actually. The House of Little Sisters is my debut YA. It was published by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, part of the Penguin Random House Group, which is based in Singapore, in 2022. I’m primarily a picture book author and that is really my happy space. When I write for YA I tend to go a bit deeper and darker.  

JOYCE: Cool. Thank you both for being here today. We’re covering a wide range of topics today, so let’s just dive in. Let’s start by talking about our author journey. So, what drew you to writing for young adults specifically? Because I personally love capturing those pivotal moments when a character is coming of age and discovering themselves. But I’m curious how you both feel about writing for young adults.  

EVA: I like young adult novels as well, as a reader, because I also like those pivotal moments that you talk about, you know, the coming of age, the discovery of self and the discovery of the world for that young adult. So I guess I haven’t really left my young adulthood, I’m still discovering the world through books. I don’t know if that answers your question. When I embarked on my journey as an author I came across an article about the trading of bondservant girls in Southeast Asia and I felt really compelled to write about this, to write the story. I couldn’t do it, obviously, for picture books. I couldn’t do it for middle grade either, it’s too young an age, so I had to go up to YA because of the themes that this book was exploring. So that started my YA journey and I have another book, which I have not yet submitted to my agent but I’m working on it. 

JOYCE: Exciting. 

RICHARD: I really like YA novels. I remember reading at that age, when I was a teen, and just really loving reading. It was one of my favourite things. I read quite broadly. I quite like genre fiction, crime, all kinds of different genres but I still read YA just as a reader and that was really where it started, thinking I wanted to do something like that. I just enjoyed reading them because often they have really compelling plots and they’re fast-paced and that pivotal moment in a person’s life and that discovery of the world, as you say. Often it’s conflict, isn’t it? Because you meet the world as that teenage character does and there’s great change there. So I think it was like coming to it as a reader and liking that genre. And then I started writing and the character happened to be a teenager. I thought I was writing a literary novel but I was drawing on all my reading, using lots of motifs and plot devices that came from my reading, I think. 

JOYCE: With regard to the books that you read when you were a teenager and read now as well, I’m just curious how your respective backgrounds and literary diet have influenced the kinds of stories you write for young adults.  

EVA: I was born in Singapore. I came to England as a young adult and I’ve been here since, so it’s been decades and decades. If I told you how many, you’d be able to guess my age but let’s just say I’ve been here a long time. But even when I was growing up in Singapore, my diet of books was all Anglo-European, published in the UK or the USA, but mostly in the UK. So, reading those books also fed into my imagination and into my process as an author. The House of Little Sisters is set primarily in Southeast Asia, in British Malaya. I must say that I didn’t read YA when I was growing up. I think YA didn’t even exist as an age group when I was a teenager. So I didn’t actually read any YA that had anyone like me in it or anyone that lived in history like me in it. Like Richard, I am a very broad reader. I like genre, I like literary, I read commercial, I just read. I don’t know if that answers your question.  

RICHARD: I suppose my reading history is mainly British. I hadn’t thought of that, actually, but yeah, the YA category didn’t really exist back then and so it was mainly children’s, but there were some where the main characters were a bit older. But only one or two, actually. But it was British rather than American, as well. Seventies, Eighties, but then I’ve gone on beyond that, I’ve just kept reading them and reading YA more broadly. It’s probably quite culturally limited, the background that I’ve had, but I think it’s getting wider as I’ve got older.  

JOYCE: We’ll get to the diversity part of the interview later on. But for now I’m also curious how your cultural contexts, because I’m a born and bred Singaporean, Richard is British and Eva straddles both cultures, so I’m kind of curious how your cultural contexts shaped the themes and the issues that you, as YA authors, tackle? Do you feel like these might differ 

significantly between different countries, different regions or different cultures? 

EVA: I tend to read a lot of East and Southeast Asian or Asian-themed YA. It’s not that I don’t read any other ones, I do, but I kind of feel I’m making up for a childhood that was missing in books. I think that’s how I approach it. And whether these themes have fed into my writing? I’ve only written one YA at the moment. I’m working on another one and it is also Asian-themed. I write historical fiction and I love reading historical fiction because I feel that there are things in the past that still affect us today and if we didn’t go back a little, two steps back or ten steps back, then we wouldn’t quite understand why we’re still being affected by these things today. So I try to explore that in my books, in some of my stories.  

RICHARD: Could I ask something? Coming at it from a Western perspective and not knowing that culture at all, that historical element was really interesting to me in The House of Little Sisters. It sounds like that’s what you’re interested in, like you’re doing that in the next one as well. 

EVA: I lived in Singapore between 2013 and 2020 but I have actually been in the UK 

since the 1990s. So my diet of books hasn’t really changed, they’ve always been British, 

and American books were also in the mix. When I went back to live in Singapore with my family, in the seven years that I was there I discovered so many things that I didn’t know existed then. And one of the things I discovered was this Muay Thai problem. The British administrators had even called it that. They called it the Muay Thai problem because it was a problem to them. They tried to eradicate it because of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1830, I think. But it didn’t work out for them in Asia. So that really intrigued me and I wanted to explore it. The book wasn’t picked up in the Western publishing circuit because it addressed themes they didn’t know about. It was a history they didn’t know about. So we got picked up by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, who, when they acquired the book, had just started their operations in Singapore.  

RICHARD: I can’t really compare because I just don’t know the Singaporean YA scene, really. But in my first book, I knew it was about the character and it was about a family and about grief and about coming to terms with bereavement and I knew I wanted to set it in a contemporary setting. And there were bits that came in that had to do with school bullying and one of the characters is quite politicised. So there were elements that came in from the world around, the contemporary world, but not massively. And then, in the next two, which were fantasy novels, especially in the third one, which I wrote during lockdown, it was much more political and my publisher thought it was a bit too on the nose, just making the points too obviously. Because it’s set in this fantasy world and there are some political elements in that fantasy world, but I wanted that to be a parallel to concerns that were relevant for me personally in British culture in 2022 or 2023. I was drawing on lots of devices that I’d come across from books I’d read – British YA or other novels. So, structurally, I was using my background as a reader and then I was responding much more directly, I felt, to what was going on. 

EVA: It’s interesting that you mentioned the politics in all of it. When I set out to write The House of Little Sisters I was curious because when I went to live in Singapore between 2013 and 2020 I saw how society there was different from society here. In Singapore, families were very dependent on their home help. Home help was relatively cheap, compared to what we were paying here in the UK. And it was something that struck me. When I went to the supermarket the helpers were the ones doing the shopping and mostly with the children. Obviously, the families in Singapore, like a lot of families in London too, are two-parent, working families but there they’re more dependent on their home help. And I remember one day I was in the supermarket and thinking, ‘Why is it like that?’ I went and dug up the history. It was this ‘why is it like that?’ question that led me to want to find out more. And I actually found the history and that there was a link to it.  

JOYCE: That’s so interesting. I think a lot of it comes from asking questions like ‘why’ and ‘what if’. So I’m also very curious how you balance out the themes. Some of the themes that you both write are pretty heavy. I was wondering how you craft an engaging story that will resonate with young adult readers, while also getting your point across through these themes.  

RICHARD: I try to start with the characters and if the reader cares about the character, then you want to follow the characters. It’s about how the character is in relation to the world, and the world is lots of things, but including politics and other things. And I do plot and structure my books quite carefully. I’m quite an architectural writer. I know some writers get more organic and that they don’t know what’s going to happen, but I tend to plot it and plan it bit by bit and I aim, whether it works or not is another matter, to have cliffhangers and suspense and peril and danger and the reader needing to read on. So those are the things that I try to make it engaging for the reader. I’m not really thinking so much that this person is a teenager, it’s more about the character. That’s why I aim to do. 

EVA: I think that comes across quite clearly in your book. I think characters are very important. They make the story. Just picking up on your point, The House of Little Sisters is a dual perspective novel. It actually started as a single perspective; it was only Mei’s story. But then there was another voice in my head that wouldn’t leave me alone and it was the older servant’s voice, Wan’s voice, and it kept interrupting Mei’s dialogue and this was all living in my head. So it’s actually the most intense story I’ve ever written, of all the stories I’ve written. I’ve written for adults before, flash fiction and all that, but this was the most intense story I’ve ever written. The two main characters were really in my head. Now that you’ve mentioned characters, I’m remembering it again, how it became a dual perspective novel and I think the dual perspective serves the novel quite well because you’re hearing it from a younger servant, who is actually enslaved, and the older servant, who is also quite enslaved, if you think about it, but she’s actually paid, and it gives the world a structure. The structure of the world is reflected in these two new dual perspectives because in 1930s Singapore there were paid servants and then slave servants. 

JOYCE: So, adding on to that, how do you create relatable and engaging protagonists? In your respective genres, be it in 1930s Malaya or the land of shadows, how do you create characters that will engage the reader but also make the themes come across as universal? 

EVA: For me it was the research. Because it’s a YA historical fiction, my story is backed 

by the research that I did. I discovered an ordinance called the 1932 Muay Thai Ordinance, which exists in a small book filled with other ordinances and the Muay Thai Ordinance was one of them. And there were these words that were used because this was the British government trying to regulate or put a fence around the trading of these bondservant girls. 

They couldn’t exactly make it illegal, so they had to find a way to say ‘Okay, you can have servants but you need to house them, you need to feed them, you need to pay them’ because they were not paid before. Often these servant girls were exchanged as gifts. One family would say ‘Okay, I’ll take your servant girl because you owe me a debt.’ So these were the words that jumped out at me from the ordinance and I was so shocked. I was so naïve. I felt after reading that, oh my goodness, these things were still happening in the 1930s. And this trading and the way servants were being treated in Asia and Southeast Asia went on and still goes on today in some parts. This went on until the ’80s. So for me, it was it was just startling, staggering, actually.  

RICHARD: I felt that when I was reading your novel, that household and the rhythms of the daily life and the details, like the cooking, so much lovely detail, and the ingredients and how they cook and the places they occupy in the house, like where the different people sleep. For me, it really embedded the characters, these people are living a real life. And I really like the dual perspective, the different characters and how they saw things. Like the older woman, how she almost accommodated the exploitation. She lived with it and almost accepted it, even though she knew it was wrong. That sort of contrast with the heroine. When you talk about research, that’s something I did a lot with the Wolf book. I did a lot of research on the place and went to visit different places. I don’t know that region, I know it a little bit, but I went and visited it and did lots of research and tried to think of the people in a real place. So, for me, that’s one of the things that makes a character more real. I’m kind of like an actor or something, I try to pretend. I see it in my head, I’m in that scene and what would I feel if I were there? So that’s what I try to do. I suppose our readers would tend to do that, identify with certain characters. That’s my hope anyway. 

JOYCE: So I presume both of you are character-driven authors? 

EVA: Yes. I definitely am. Even when I write picture books, they are often led by my characters.  

JOYCE: So how do you go about crafting your character? Do you start with a specific trait? Do you simplify them? Do you have one of the characters represent something and your protagonist represent something else? Is that how you build your characters or how do you craft them? 

EVA: Oh, great question. I think for The House of Little Sisters, I would say that Mei represents bondservant girls and Wan represents the older, wiser but ambivalent woman. As Richard correctly picked up, she’s ambivalent but she’s only ambivalent because she’s absorbed all that patriarchy around her. So she is representative of that, I suppose. It came across to you as well that she is ambivalent and I’m glad that you got that. 

RICHARD: I think I used to be more schematic. In the first one, I was definitely thinking, so you’ve got our hero and he’s going to be like this and he does this. It was a bit more simplistic. But as I’m writing more, I’m trying more and more, before I even start writing, 

to picture the characters in my head more and to write scenes that don’t appear in the book and to think about their relationships more, just to make them a bit more real. I roughly know what the story is but I don’t set out to write until I try to live with the characters a bit more. That’s a bit of a process for me, I think, as a writer, trying to develop that. I think that’s partly what I respond to in a book, if I love the character. 

JOYCE: You mentioned diversity earlier on. Back in the ’90s, I don’t think the Young Adult scene was as bustling as it is now. And it’s for the better, right? There are so many more voices now and a lot of marginalised voices are coming to the forefront, which is great. How do you think the scene has changed since you started reading Young Adult, back in the day? I guess back in the day for me would be like Catcher in the Rye. That was actually my first Young Adult book that I read as a kid. And Little Women, I’m not sure if that counts as Young Adult. 

EVA: That’s a good one, actually. 

JOYCE: Those were the ones that I read as a kid. Well, I read it when I was ten years old, so not really a young adult yet. But there are so many voices now and I was just wondering how you feel about the scene. What else are you anticipating in the future for Young Adult fiction? 

EVA: I think Young Adult will never go away. It’s an age category in publishing that will stick forever and ever. But there’s also another one called New Adult, which is less heard of. 

RICHARD: I didn’t know about that. 

EVA: So, with Young Adult, the character is usually between 17, 18 years old or 16, let’s say, 16 average. And they are discovering themselves, maybe first love and first love with touch, maybe, first physical love. They’re discovering their world. They have this perspective of the world and then something changes and they discover that perspective is not correct and then they discover themselves. Whereas I think with New Adult, from what I understand, that young adult has grown up a little bit. They’re in their twenties, right? Maybe they’re starting their first serious relationship, their first serious job and they discover themselves again. It’s another coming of age. I think that every stage of our lives is a coming of age, it’s just that publishing is very fixated on ‘Oh, you’re 16 and you’re coming of age.’ Because you are still coming of age at 30, at 40, at 50. Because you’re a different person one decade later. You’re discovering what you are in that decade. But let’s go back to YA. I think it will stay and I think that publishers are not going to stop publishing YA at any time. They want, especially in the UK, to get more and more diverse in this or they have a mind to be more diverse. But I think, at the end of it, publishing is also a business. So sometimes the editor may see potential in a story and the sales team says, ‘Okay, how can we sell this? Who’s going to buy it?’ Going back to The House of Little Sisters, it wasn’t picked up here, not even after it was published by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia. I was told that Penguin Random House UK didn’t want to pick it up because they didn’t know how to market it. It’s a history that is not taught in schools, for example. Because here we learn about British history, of course, World War One, World War Two, maybe some colonial history. India is a bigger colonial history that we learn about here in the UK, not Southeast Asia. 

RICHARD: I don’t try very hard to keep up. I should keep up to date more with what’s being published and chosen to be published by the publishers. I’m aware of it. I go to the bookshop, you know, Waterstones, the big chain bookshops and see what’s being published 

and read a few, but not many. I see that it changes but I don’t really keep right up to the minute with it. I can see it’s becoming more diverse and I think that’s a good thing, that it’s giving a broader view of what reality is, which I think is good. And I think the publishers are more aware of it, especially in the last, say, four or five years and that they have to be more engaged with it. So I think there’s an impetus for them to want to do that. And there are more voices being heard, which is good. I’ve noticed in my writing, almost by accident, that I’m bringing in slightly more diverse viewpoints but in a slightly tangential way. In my third fantasy novel, there’s quite a few characters who are refugees. There’s a character who’s half an angel and half a human. And I realised, as I was writing it, you know, conversations about the trans movement and things, there’s a chime there. I wonder if it’s partly where that’s having characters who are not one thing, that sort of ambiguity. So I just thought, oh, I’m responding a little to the way British culture is changing, slightly. So I think my writing is changing, although I’m not trying to, not consciously thinking what’s going to be the next big thing and try and do it. That’s my own personal take on it. 

EVA: Yeah, I totally get that because when I first started writing I realised a lot of my characters were very whitewashed because I was writing to cater to the Anglo-Saxon market. And it’s only because of the rise of more diverse books in the past decade or so that I decided to really embrace my cultural background and my roots and write more Asian fantasy, for instance, or books that are actually set in Singapore instead of some generic setting that I try to make more universal in order to reach my readers. But when you’re trying to write for everyone you’re actually writing for no one. So I try to narrow it down and make the sense of place stronger in my writing. So I think this trend in publishing has really helped a lot of authors to come to terms with our own culture and I think this is a good direction that we’re taking. Hopefully it will continue or flourish further. 

JOYCE: So, Richard, you mentioned that you’ve incorporated more diversity in your books, 

subconsciously. But Eva, your books actually focus quite heavily on Asian representation, 

Chinese representation. So what other than having your books not picked up by, let’s say, UK publishing, what other specific challenges or triumphs have you faced in writing your stories, your kind of stories? 

EVA: That’s a great question, quite a thought-provoking one. In the UK, I am known here as an advocate for diversity and representation of East and Southeast Asian culture, heritage and people. If I may say so, we’re still quite colonial here. We’re divided into different racial groups, for example. Black, Asian and minority ethnic, which is an acronym that doesn’t include black and Asian. And so publishing sees us this way as well, unfortunately. So when publishing talks about diversity representation, they will look at how many percentage of books of black characters or by black people, how many percentage by Asian authors, Asian being from South Asia. And someone like me who is British, East Asian but from Singapore, I fall between all the cracks. And so when I’m commissioned to write books by publishers they usually ask me to write books that are of East Asian, which is China, usually, representation, which I am, I am ethnic Chinese but then also Singaporean and also Southeast Asian. So the world is so much more hyphenated. But I don’t think publishing has caught on. It’s not to say they’re not trying, they are trying. The recent CLP report that was just published this morning has shown that the trend – I wish they would stop calling it a trend because it should never be a trend, diversity and representation is a must, it’s not a trend because we live in this diverse world. Whether we’re racially diverse, culturally diverse, gender diverse, so many types of diversity, but publishing is still thinking in the dominant. I will probably get into trouble saying this but anyway, it is what it is and we work with what we have to work with. So these are the challenges for me, I guess, as someone who straddles all these identities and all these spaces and trying to get my voice heard because as an East and Southeast Asian Briton, I am quite a small number. I think we’re less than even 1%. I don’t know how many percent we are but we’re tiny, compared to the black communities and the South Asian communities. So I kind of go out there, I guess. This is what I do. I don’t know when I’ll be cancelled but I’ll do my best. 

JOYCE: So what advice would both of you give to writers who are trying to break into the YA market and also write the stories of their heart, whether they’re in Singapore, the UK or anywhere else around the world? 

RICARD: I think it’s really important to write what you want to write, what you believe in. I think that from having written lots of different things, when my heart is really in it I really want to write it. I think what I write, what I produce is better. And also, it’s going to be difficult to get published anyway. I mean, I’m writing things now that are not getting published and they’ll probably just carry on like that, you know. Some will, some won’t. If I was giving advice to a writer, someone who’s starting, I would say just do what you want to do because they can’t take that away from you. If you write something for the market, it might not get published and then you haven’t got anything anyway. But if you do it and you love it and you’re really proud of it, I think that’s more important.  

EVA: Absolutely. I echo that. Just write if you want to write. Writing is like a beast, isn’t it? It just possesses you. And if you are a writer, that beast lives in you. It’s very hard to exorcise it. So write what you want. Just write whatever it is that makes you happy. And don’t write to trends, like never. Because if it’s a trend, it will change. I don’t know if I have a lot of advice, 

but I’ve just always written. And like Joyce, when I started out writing I had characters that were named Michael and Angela, they were not called Mei or Wan or any other Asian name. But that was because I was reading books with children who had very British names, as I said earlier. But then when I grew up I thought, okay, but my world is not this way, my family is not like that. Not all my cousins have English or British names or anglicised names. So I matured as a writer as well. So you will mature as a writer. I hope that every book I write will be better than the last one. 

RICHARD: Yeah. Me too. I feel the same.  

JOYCE: Are there any other genres or themes that you’re hoping to explore for your next book? 

RICHARD: I’m writing lots of different things at the moment. I’m writing a long short story about a hand, a ghost story about a ghostly hand. And I’ve been planning a YA book and I want to have some sharks in it. Whether it will or not, I don’t know, but I want to write about sharks next. 

EVA: At the moment, I’m really enjoying retelling East Asian folk tales. I did a lot of research 

into that and it resulted in eighteen short stories – East Asian folktales, myths and legends. I had so much fun retelling these for a younger audience, the middle grade, and I want to continue doing that for an even younger audience, for picture books, actually. 

RICHARD: You said you’re working on the YA one. Maybe you don’t want to talk about it because you’re in the middle of it. But which historical setting will it have? 

EVA: It will be post-war British Malaya. It will deal with the war history in that part of the world.  

JOYCE: Another research-heavy book.  

EVA: Yeah. I enjoy the research, actually. Even if it never results in a book, I will have learned something from it.  

JOYCE: What do you hope your reader will take away from your next piece of work? 

EVA: The story, I hope, and the characters and that they will learn. I hate to say this but I learned potted history through reading books. I read a lot of historical fiction because I want to learn more about a certain place, a certain period. So I enjoy that. And as much as I like doing research, sometimes you read all these academic books and they’re very boring, very dry. So I think fiction is a great way to weave a bit of academic stuff into it. I hope that’s what it is. It doesn’t have to be historical fiction. I’ve learned so much from reading your book, Richard, about the place. Because place is also a character. We could have another panel discussion on that, place as character. I learn from books, actually. So I think that’s the takeaway for me and for my readers. 

RICHARD: When I was reading your book last week I got a very strong sense of place, like the compound of the house with the yard and the gates and the different parts. And the streets around, the herbalist and where they go to get the food, where her boyfriend is. This little part of the city, it’s got a very strong sense of place. 

EVA: Thank you.  

RICHARD: It’s a real pleasure to read, for me as a reader. So I think what I would want a reader to experience is to enjoy it and, if I could do it successfully, to write a book that a reader would pick up and just become absorbed in, fall into and love reading. I’m quite happy just for it to be an entertainment, a rich entertainment, not just a fast food but a really good, delicious meal that they want to read. Something that’s pleasurable, that’s what I would hope. 

JOYCE: That actually takes me to my final question. How do you think we as writers can engage young adult readers now that we’re in an age of social media and there are so many distractions and a lot of teenagers spend more time on their phone than they would with a book? How do you think we as writers can engage them? 

RICHARD: This is not directly related to your question, but I’ve been doing a lot of school 

visits the last year or so and one of them was for a whole year group. So about one hundred kids. It was at a literary festival and rather than the children having to buy the book if they wanted it, the festival actually bought every child in that year group a book, one hundred books in total, and gave it to them. That was a state school and a lot of them were not big readers, according to the teacher. I know it’s a little thing, but there were a lot of children there and when I did the talk and the reading and got them doing some writing exercises and writing their own stories – they were about thirteen, these kids, a bit younger than YA, but there was an awful lot of children who were not that engaged in writing who came away from it a little more enthused at the possibility of what writing might be and what reading might be. I know that’s slightly different from a book being read to them or somebody just going into a bookshop or a library. But I found that if I can get to the school and get the children writing or something, that really helps. 

EVA: I think author visits are important. It’s good because I think there are students who read, children read anyway but they start out having to read because it’s compulsory. Then some might pick it up, some may love it more, others may not. And when an author visits a school what they get to see is that there is a person behind the book because sometimes they don’t even know who the author is, unless that author is famous or a celebrity. So when they see the author they realise there is a person behind the book, there is a person behind the stories. And they get to ask the author, ‘Why did you write the character this way?’ or the kinds of questions we are exploring here today. And for the author to be able to answer that is something special for a child, I think. And they don’t forget. I think it’s important, budgets allowing of course, that authors get asked to go to schools as much as possible. 

JOYCE: You both mentioned that it starts at the school level, engaging the readers directly, which is a great way of looking at it. I never really saw it that way because I write for older young adults. A lot of schools prefer middle grade books, which are more accessible for their students, so I’ve never really done any author visits or author talks at school. But hearing from both of you, who have done author visits in schools, it’s kind of reframed the way I look at it. And it’s so interesting how, as an author, you don’t realise how much impact you might have on the readers, especially young readers, and how you can shape their interest in reading. So that’s a very interesting way to look at things and I might go on a few author visits myself now. 

RICHARD: What do you think, Joyce, about reaching YA readers? Do you think there are ways to do it? 

JOYCE: Well, I have interacted with my YA readers before and I think a lot of them have a small ember of ambition or aspiration to be a writer but they don’t think it’s possible. So sometimes when they come to me they ask me, ‘Is it possible to be a writer in Singapore? Is it a viable profession?’ And I think I realised that they actually have a lot of questions and a lot of interest in writing and also reading because you can’t be a writer without being a reader. But a lot of them just don’t have that encouragement, I guess, or maybe a more encouraging environment for them to pursue this passion of theirs. So I think engaging young adults at festivals, at schools is also a great way to stoke their little ember and make it into a great fire.  

RICHARD: Absolutely. Yeah. We do have a lot of school programmes in the UK where we want to encourage our children to read for pleasure. A lot of our children are not really reading for pleasure because they’re reading for exams, for example. There are a lot of programmes here, like the Open University Reading for Pleasure initiative and other literary festivals also picking up on that theme. So I hope that continues. 

 JOYCE: I guess the three of us write in very different genres, actually. I write Asian fantasy. 

Richard, you write YA contemporary and fantasy and Eva, you write picture books and also historical YA. So I guess the question is what are the universal themes across all these different genres that you think will resonate with young adult readers? Because a lot of readers are still experimenting with the kind of books they like to read. Some of them might be more drawn to historical fiction, some of them might be drawn to a more contemporary voice, but I think having universal themes helps to make one reader cross over into another genre. So what are the universal themes that can help with the crossover appeal? 

EVA: I think YA in general, as an age category, helps readers to explore and, like we said already, their coming of age and growing up, their maturing. And these are universal themes, whatever the genre of the novel is – historical fiction, contemporary fantasy – they’re all in YA, as far as I’ve observed. Love is another theme. Look at the rise of romantasy, for example. I mean, it’s not like in fantasy there’s never any love. There always is. And how that teen character navigates love in all its forms, I guess. To me, a personally important theme is to explore patriarchy. As a woman, I think about patriarchy a lot because we are still living in a patriarchy. So things like that, I guess. 

RICHARD: That’s interesting. While you were talking, I was thinking. As we said at the beginning about coming of age stories and how it’s such a big moment in a human being’s life, that it’s so fundamental, that transition from family to being an individual, it’s such a huge thing. It’s dramatic. Psychologically or psychically it’s dramatic. So it can be fantasy or contemporary. You don’t have to be a YA reader to find that theme gripping. And yeah, love and especially first love in the YA books. Because it’s so much more acute, isn’t it? That feeling of being overwhelmed by it and the pain of it finishing or perishing. I recently reread The Hobbit. That’s a very British adventure story. But he kind of grows up in that. It’s a coming of age story in a way, even though it’s an adventure story. The first book that I wrote, The Wolf Road, is about grief. Huge human themes, I suppose. I guess it’s the human condition, isn’t it?  

JOYCE: What I love about YA is that a lot of YA authors don’t shy away from these themes. They explore them and make them relatable and accessible to young adults, even though a lot of them may not have experienced those themes yet. They understand what it’s about and a lot of them can relate to that, even though their experience is still quite limited. One of the things that I also like to explore is the coming of age and finding their own independence. So for my book, it was about this girl who has to leave her tribe in order to save it. She has to find her way around the world after being protected by her tribe for most of her formative years, her growing up years. So she has to decide what her destiny is, how much control she has over her life and I think, as young adults, a lot of them might start to question where they might go, what their place is in the world and these are some of the themes that can resonate with them as well.  

RICHARD: Did you have that in mind before you started writing, that that was going to be a driver or big important element or was it a fantasy story?  

JOYCE: Well, like both of you, I’m also a character-driven writer, so I start with the character. I wanted her to be expelled from her tribe and to find herself, find her place in the world. But I didn’t actually think about the theme before I wrote the book. Usually the theme comes to me in retrospect and I just follow the characters, where they want to go and where they are meant to go, and in creating the arc, in writing the books, I realised this is the theme, this is her character arc, this is how she’s meant to grow. She’s finding her place in the world, she’s realising she doesn’t have as much agency as she thought she had and sometimes things are just destined but she’s trying to fight against that. So I guess that was the theme I was grappling with while I was writing my trilogy. 

EVA: Picking up on destiny, it is a huge theme, isn’t it? It’s fate, it’s where we’re going to go from here after we face all these challenges in life. And I think that is something 

that I also explored in my book. 

JOYCE: The thing is, they do have agency in a sense, you want to give them agency, but a lot of them are restricted by their surroundings, by their environment, by the sociocultural restrictions that they have imposed upon them and I think that’s where the conflict lies. That’s why your book is so juicy. Your character is fighting against these restrictions and trying to carve her own way. 

EVA: Yeah. You’re right. Finding agency, especially as a girl. It took me a while as an Asian woman to find my agency and I think that was something I explored in The House of 

Little Sisters. 

JOYCE: Well, I guess that is all the time we have today. Thank you so much for sharing, for being so generous and sharing your thoughts. I’ve learned so much from both of you. Thank you for joining us for Meet the World and many thanks to the National Centre for Writing for having us.