I approached 24 [authors of young adult fiction.] …15 authors replied, of whom 11 agreed to talk to me, either by email or on the phone. Two subsequently withdrew, in one case following professional advice. Two have received death threats and five would only talk if I concealed their identity. This is not what normally happens when you ask writers for an interview.

……”the publisher was scared of Twitter. They admitted this, because there are things like a racist character in the book. They were worried that people would say, ‘This has got a racist character. The author must be racist.’”

…“Young adult” means books suitable for readers aged 12 to 18, and the grownups who write them exhibit en masse the same idealism and energy, the defiance and conformity, and the love of social media for which teenagers are famous. Spend time weaving through the Twitter feeds of YA bloggers and authors and you’ll find a supportive atmosphere for struggling writers, along with a widespread belief that the novels they produce should be good in all ways, moral and artistic. In particular, every author I’ve spoken to agrees that marginalised people must be represented in books more accurately and often than in the past.

…In May 2014, a new fan convention in New York called BookCon announced an all-male, all-white panel for its Blockbuster Reads event, and We Need Diverse Books grew out of the protests that followed. In September 2015, Corinne Duyvis, a Dutch YA author, proposed the Twitter label #ownvoices to promote books in which “the protagonist and author share a marginalised identity”.  It has since become a kind of quality assurance mark for many campaigners, since it means that a book will help diversify both the characters and authors in YA fiction, while guaranteeing that the author knows what life with the character’s identity is like. In autumn 2015, Kirkus began a policy of noting the skin colour of major characters in children’s and YA books, and assigning own-voices reviewers to them. Kirkus also started to provide what it called “sensitivity training” to its reviewers. The employment of sensitivity readers became routine in US YA publishing at around the same time.

…Heidi Heilig runs a YA Facebook group with more than 1,700 members. She says that the community is much more moderate and reasonable than many outsiders have been led to believe. “There is a sect of people who say, ‘Any criticism is censorship,’” she says. “There are people who say, ‘You can only write a character from a certain race if you are of that certain race.’ But a lot of the conversation falls somewhere in the middle.”

…“I see sensitivity reads as a form of peer review,” says one, who asked not to be identified. “There are some things as a white, cis, straight person that I may not notice or even consider. ”

…“I think there have been many careless and even damaging representations of people of colour in books,” she says, “and as a reader I’ve experienced it throughout my life. Sometimes it’s just eye-rolling, sometimes it makes you want to shut the book in exasperation, so I understand that there’s a lot of anger about how people are represented. I absolutely get that. But the way that things have played out this year doesn’t sit comfortably for me … I absolutely agree that sloppy representation should be spoken out against, but I think this should happen in ways that encourage constructive dialogue rather than cancellation.”

…“One thing that saddens me about the way that the argument is polarised on social media is how many people comment negatively, particularly, on books that they haven’t read,” she says. “I think that is an unhealthy attitude for a readership to have. They don’t want to make up their own minds based on their own experience.”

Torn apart: the vicious war over young adult books | Books | The Guardian

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