The YA boo gang

Talk to anyone who works in books — whether they’re a writer, an editor, an agent or a critic — and there are two letters that will reliably bring a cloud of unhappiness across their face. Whisper them and watch the misery descend: YA. On the face of it, there’s no good reason for this. The initials stand for “young adult”, and refer to fiction aimed at readers between the ages of about 14 and 18; but somehow, these books have become one of the most savage fronts in cancel culture.

Originally, though, YA was a solid success story. It’s approximately ten years since the genre entered popular consciousness, driven by the massive success of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books and Susan Collins’s Hunger Games. The label was new, but the market had pedigree: authors such as Philip Pullman (the Northern Lights trilogy), Malorie Blackman (Noughts and Crosses) and, most of all, J. K. Rowling had already demonstrated the value of writing for an audience at the cusp of maturity.

The YA boom was an assurance that not only did readers still exist (despite the temptations of the internet), but they were young enough to sustain decades of retail. Some writers began to turn to YA out of frustration with adult fiction. The British author Alex Wheatle has said that he felt he was “not