Saturday, 19 September 2009

International YA Blogger Celebration: Steph from Australia

Name: Steph Bowe
Country: Victoria, Australia
Blog: Hey! Teenager of the Year

Your favourite YA title: Everything Beautiful by Simmone Howell - pure wonderfulness.
Favourite New Find: Sprout by Dale Peck - a fantastic, funny and true GLBT novel.
Bookstore of Choice: I live about twenty minutes from a bookstore, and that bookstore is basically a shrine to Edward Cullen, so I try and avoid it. When I was in Sydney, exploring, I found this really awesome three-storey second-hand bookstore. I love any cool, individual type book place - I don’t really shop at chains. Go the indie!
Author blog you are most likely to be found stalking: Simmone Howell's Post Teen Trauma

Book Blogging from Australia
Best thing about being from Australia:

The people - Australian’s are (usually) laid-back and friendly. Also, in the Northern states, the weather is pretty magnificent. Oh, and the culture in the cities is great.

What is the state of YA literature in Australia?
Pretty good, I think - Australian YA is alive and well, and though we have only a small market, the caliber of our books is fantastic.

How accessible are international YA titles in Australia:
We get a lot of US YA books in the shops, and the things we don’t have can be ordered on Amazon.

Authors that you would recommend:

Lili Wilkinson - all her books are phenomenal, Pink especially; James Roy - Town is amazing, as are all his other books, and; Simmone Howell - Everything Beautiful and Notes From the Teenage Underground are both fantastic, brutally honest books.

Most popular YA author in Australia:

Stephenie Meyer’s books are ridiculously popular here. I’m forced on a daily basis to throw things at people reading Twilight at bus stops. Cassandra Clare’s books are also pretty widely popular. As for local, almost every Australian teenager has read one of Melina Marchetta’s books.

Best thing about YA blogging:

The people! The bloggers, the authors, the publishers - I’ve learnt a lot from YA book blogging, and contacted people I’d never have met otherwise. And the contact I’ve made with publishers around the world and with aspiring and established authors has been invaluable to my writing.

YA blogs that you would recommend from Austrlia:

Rhiannon Hart’s blog and of course Adele’s blog, Persnickety Snark.

Thanks Steph! If you check out her blog, you'll see that Steph has her own celebration at the moment - Books Change Lives. Many people (including bloggers) have contributed a piece of writing on a book that has changed their life, including yours truly. It's definitely a series of posts you should check out.

Tomorrow we head away from Australia and towards Manilla where we'll touch based with the lovely Tarie from Into the Wardrobe.

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International YA Blogger Celebration posts:
Marjolein from The Netherlands
Rhiannon from Melbourne, Australia
Silvia from Ripollet, Spain
Thao from Vietnam
Jo from London, UK
Lauren and Alex from Canada
Alea from USA
Prodhi from Bangladesh

and more to come each day...

3 comments:

Lauren said...

Great interview. It's quite frankly reassuring to hear that 'shrine to Edward Cullen' bookstores exist in other countries too, I was starting to suspect it was only UK bookstores that think teens won't buy books unless they're presented on a black-and-red themed display table.

I need to check out some Melina Marchetta, I think.

Unknown said...

Really interesting interview, Stev is such a fun person Thank you so much for sharing.

Barry Eva (Storyheart)
Author of "Across the Pond"

Blog: http://acrossthepond-storyheart.blogspot.com

Tarie Sabido said...

Steph Bowe is truly the most amazing fifteen-year-old I know.

And Filipino bookstores are Edward Cullen shrines, too!