We're delighted to announce that the great YA writer Mal Peet will be convening a special 300-level workshop in YA writing at the IIML in the first trimester of 2013 (i.e. March-June). Mal's awards include the Branford Boase Award, the Carnegie Medal, two JLG Premier Selection Awards (USA), The Gouden Lijst (Holland), The Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honour (USA). With his wife, Elspeth Graham, Mal also writes picture books for younger readers. Their Cloud Tea Monkeys (2010, illustrated by Juan Wijngaard) was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal in the UK and won an Aesop Award in the USA.Mal writes:
'I have, rather reluctantly, chosen to use the imprecise term ‘Young Adult’ to identify the focus of this workshop. This is in order to distinguish the kind of writing I’d like to nurture from an increasingly generic and market-driven "Teen Fiction" in which adolescents masquerade as action heroes, spies and thousand year-old vampires. Although I’m deeply averse to categorising novels in terms of the presumed age of readership, I guess we’ll be looking at writing for readers aged 15 and older; readers making that interesting and important transition between children’s literature and adult literature. My core beliefs are that these young readers are not necessarily or exclusively interested in books about people like themselves; and that they deserve writing of the highest quality.'
More information as it comes to hand . . .