What is Young Adult Fiction? David Belbin Senior Lecturer in English, Nottingham Trent University Abstract Belbin describes how he came to write novels for teenagers as a result of hi reading when training to be an English teacher. He discusses the nature and function of Young Adult Fiction. He gives an account of his publications that demonstrates the variety of creative work that has allowed him to have a prolonged career, including YA novels for ‘reluctant’ readers and his first published ‘adult’ novel. He briefly summarises a conference about the state of YA Fiction, ‘Turning Point’, that he organised, and comes to a partial definition of the term ‘Young Adult Fiction’. Keywords Creative writing, reading, reluctant readers, teenagers, young adult fiction, reflection on practice An education I come from the last generation of teenagers who didn’t have novels written specifically for them. An early reader, I soon used up the books at home. I went from Blyton to Captain W.E. Johns to Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. haunted libraries, but my reading was unguided and, by the age of thirteen, scattershot. In my Grammar School English class forty of us read classic tex for exams. We each took turns to read aloud, slowly and badly, killing off ou interest in the process. I all but stopped reading fiction for pleasure. When I was 16, we moved towns and I went to Sixth Form at a Catholic Comprehensive in Burnley, where an A level teacher made us write a report comparing Austen’s Persuasion to a modern novel. He gave us a list of authors. I worked my way through Margaret Drabble then swooped on Kerouac and Sartre in the school library. I’d never stopped writing poetry, but now my love of novels reawoke. Although I went to university to read Law, I soon realised that I’d made a mistake. I switched to a degree in English and American Literature and began to believe that I had a vocation to write fictio Corresponding author: belbin@ntlworld.com 132 ª 2011 The Author. English in Education ª 2011 National Association for the Teaching of English. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-8845.2011.01094.x English in Education Vol.45 No.2 2011