By Lydia Schofield
Talking about books is half the joy of reading, and it’s the lifeblood of the literary community in this country. Readers, writers and the industry are brought together through reviews, festivals, podcasts and events. However, there is a glaring gap in these discussions, which has grown over the last few years. We do not give youth literature—picture books, middle grade and YA—the space it deserves in our national book conversation, and we are all worse off for it.
The current state of play
The Centre of Youth Literature—which housed the forum site Inside a Dog, one of the few dedicated teen-reader spaces online, and the teen-voted Inky Awards for YA—was ‘retired’ by the State Library of Victoria in 2019. The website, which was meant to continue, is now a dead link.
There are only two annual unpublished manuscript awards for children’s and YA writing within Australia—the Text Prize and the Ampersand Prize. Many of the larger national unpublished manuscript awards, including those run through the various state premier’s literary awards, exclude youth literature.
Local mainstream media also has very little youth literature coverage. The Guardian, for example, publishes a weekly book review. Since the middle of 2020, they have reviewed three books by Kate Grenville but have not reviewed any youth literature titles. Meanwhile, its UK counterpart publishes a weekly children’s book round-up.
The ABC publishes a monthly book round-up, but as far as I can tell, has not included a youth literature title for almost two years, aside from Bluey board books.
This absence also carries into dedicated literary spaces in the media. Kill Your Darlings, Australian Book Review and Sydney Review of Books, for instance, do not have recent youth literature reviews clearly available on their website. This may well be a simple error in their search mechanism or the way their websites are organised; however, not being able to easily find youth literature content creates the same outcomes as it not being present at all.
Writers’ festivals are more varied. Despite YA days held at Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide Writers’ Weeks and previous Melbourne Writers Festivals, the 2023 and 2024 programs for MWF had only two children’s events per festival (excluding school events, which are not open to the public), which focused on activities for very young children. There were no YA events. Why the City of Literature’s festival has dropped its youth events is beyond me, but I hope other festivals continue to include their middle grade and YA programming, which has proven popular.
What coverage do we get?
When youth literature is discussed in traditional media, we are subjected to the same arguments made again and again. YA only gets a look in when adult readers are centred—for example when YA publishing seems to cater more and more to adult readers, a phenomenon broken down here—or when publications are, rightly, examining threats posed by book banning (although these articles often focus on parents’ responses to bans or controversial books and not on teen readers’ access to and experience of these books).
For children’s fiction, the articles that do get published are either worried about children’s declining engagement with reading (which is a valid concern) or as we see in this example in the Saturday Paper, they bemoan the supposed decline in quality since the journalists were children. Ignoring the fact that easy-to-read, silly books have always existed and have always been an important part of a child’s reading journey—and indeed, of all readers’ media diets—these articles betray an ignorance of the market today and don’t meaningfully engage with the immense quantity of diverse, high-quality books being published for young people.
These articles do not centre the experience of children and teenagers as the intended recipients of these books, but instead seek to create a moral panic around a section of the publishing industry in which the writer is not an active or informed participant. To me, it seems these articles are intended to spark outrage or fill a quota, rather than meaningfully examine the youth literature landscape.
There are real-world consequences to the way we currently discuss youth literature. When we only discuss youth lit in articles about book bans or TikTok-driven analysis articles about ‘the state of YA’, we treat it like a Neverland crocodile—something only to be looked at closely when we hear ticking danger approaching.
Silence is dangerous
As a student librarian and emerging YA writer, the book industry’s silence around youth literature scares me. I expect more attacks to come for the kind of fiction I love, as we’re already seeing after Cumberland Council’s bans and attacks on Gender Queer. I worry that by refusing to discuss youth literature in the good times, there will be no allies to stand with its writers, readers and gatekeepers when we are threatened again. I worry that when we issue the warning signs, the rest of the industry will not listen. As we’ve seen throughout the history of book banning, attacks may begin with children’s titles, but they rarely stop there. They may start by targeting Gender Queer, The Hate U Give and Judy Blume, but soon Toni Morrison, The Catcher in the Rye and Nineteen Eighty-Four are on the chopping block too.
It is more important than ever that everyone becomes involved—even in tiny ways—with youth literature. Children who read become adults who read, and we always need more of those. Culturally, we are facing falling literacy rates, a reliance on social media, threats made against library events that promote reading and censorship in many forms. We need as many people on board as possible to prevent these events from further harming youth literature.
The journey from publisher to reader is less straightforward for Kidlit than for the rest of the market because kids don’t tend to buy their own books: their grown-ups do. If an adult book buyer can’t open a newspaper, literary magazine or writers’ festival program and see kids’ books alongside the ones they’re reading, the acquisition process becomes more difficult. Kids deserve to read CBCA winners and high fantasy and rich, complex, contemporary stories and gross-out adventures and fart books and simplistic fairy stories. They deserve to read widely and richly, as everyone does. For adults to both pick those books up and support their children in choosing those books, they need to be put in places where the adults can see them, including in the book-related media adults consume.
Of course, for these books to be available at all, we also need better structures to allow writers the time and space to create them. We need investments in writing, including more opportunities like unpublished manuscript prizes, residencies and workshops that are explicitly and enthusiastically open to accepting and championing writers and illustrators of youth literature. We need mainstream platforms to take the work seriously and feature it regularly in their conversations, reviews and events.
And we need adults to read youth literature, for their own good as well as the industry’s. Anyone who’s picked up a Text Prize, CBCA Award or Carnegie winner recently will know what a magical experience good Kidlit is. How many classics and cultural icons like Looking for Alibrandi, Puberty Blues and Possum Magic were written for children and have seeped into the national consciousness?
The frustrating thing is that we already know this to be true. Concerns around exclusion and silence are exactly the concerns that the Stella Prize was founded to combat. If we can make changes to women’s writing the way the Stella has, why aren’t we trying to do the same for youth literature?
To be fair, there are places that consistently discuss youth literature. But many of them—like Magie Magazine—are subscription-based or behind paywalls, while others, including community-run efforts like Your Kids Next Read, are only aimed at parents and teachers. I believe this leaves us open for attack. If only gatekeepers are in the loop, who else is going to stand up when youth literature becomes the subject of bans, protests and misinformation? The fire of book banning is already raging in the US, but sparks are igniting here too. My local library had to cancel its IDAHOBIT drag story time after threats were made against library staff. In that case, it was queer allies who rallied to revive and protect the event; it was viewed as an act of homophobia, not an attack on youth literature. But it was both.
So, show up for youth literature. Join me in demanding better of our literary journals, newspapers, festivals and community water coolers. Let’s build stronger, more widespread conversations about youth literature so that when and if worse times come, we are ready and united, and we can ensure readers’ access to a wide range of incredible books.
Lydia Schofield is a YA writer and student librarian with a particular interest in children’s and YA literature. They have been published in Books+Publishing, WhyNot, Catalyst and What You Become, an anthology of emerging writers from RMIT’s PWE program. They can be found on Instagram @scho.lydia.
Cover image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash. Free to use under the Unsplash License.
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