British author of children, young adult and adult fiction, Anthony McGowan, attending the Galle Literary Festival, spoke to us about writing for multiple age groups and of misconceptions in the Young Adult genre at Galle Fort Printers. 

As an adult and children’s book author – what is your comfort zone of the two? Well, strangely it’s a bit in the middle. My default mental space is probably teenage or what is now called Young Adult (YA). The very first book I wrote was a YA and most of my critically acclaimed books are YA. This is because a teenager’s life is that every day it’s full of intensity, joy, despair and some great friendships so basically all the stuff that stories are made of. And then it’s also nice to play with slightly more adult context in adult novels and even writing a children’s book is fun. Children really love toilet humour! It cracks them! 

How do you write a children’s novel? 

So what really helped me get into the mind of a child is having kids myself so it’s easy to think like an eight year old boy! Your books are a little on how they interact and behave. My kids are my first readers and the thing about kids is that they can’t hide it when they are bored so if they don’t like it they are yawning and they also don’t pretend to be joyful so if they laugh they genuinely think it’s funny. My kids are my best critiques. 

How do you channel a teenager when writing your YA novels? 

I never left it! Where I went to school, every day it was war and some memories got burned into my mind because they were so dramatic and intense. There was a lot of violence, proper actual fist fights and all and the teachers controlled the kids with violence. Plus theirs also love for the first time; body is changing and your minds full of ideas. It’s very exciting to channel a teenager. 

Your book, The Knife that Killed Me, got adapted onto the big screen last year. Were you happy with how it all turned out? 

I liked everything about it! There was nothing I can complain about. It was extraordinary. A couple of scenes in the film were a complete dejavu moment because I saw some of my real life experiences bought to life in the exact way and it was spine tingling. I always think it’s wrong to say that the film has no captured the book accurately because books are words and films are sound and images and I think films are its own work of art and Marcus Romer did a great job of the book’s movie adaptation. 

There has always been a misconception about YA novels, and as an author who always writes books with underlying tones of much bigger issues such as bullying does it ever annoy you to be stereotyped? 

So I have a slightly different view on this and I fall out with some of my fellow YA authors on this all the time. I think teenagers should read teenage books and also adult books if they want to, but once you become an adult you should read adult books. I know some adults who only read YA and they have never sort of broken away from the comfortable world that YA can be. So once you grow up, grow out of John Green! 

By Panchali Illankoon
Photographs by Pradeep Dilrukshana