YA Book Prize shortlist: Melinda Salisbury in conversation about Her Dark Wings

How would you describe your book to someone who hasn’t read it?

It’s a loose take on the Persephone origin story, set in a modern-day, alternate universe. It deals with first love, second love, betrayal and the power and limits of anger, centring on a girl who has the capacity to both bring life and death to the world. Her Dark Wings follows that girl, Corey, on her journey while she decides how and who she wants to be, confronting her past and the darkness within her.

What inspired the story?

Lots of things! My books never have one true root or inspiration, they’re all Franken-stories made up of bits and pieces that suddenly coalesce into a single story – it often feels like making a sauce, you keep your pot on the heat and you add ingredients to it and you give it a stir, and if you get the order right and the timing right, you get the good sauce!

And if you don’t, bad sauce. Takeaway time.

Which character in the book is your favourite, and why?

I loved writing Corey as it was very cathartic to write someone who so easily leant into her anger and used it to fuel her, and most of all, didn’t try to make it palatable for other people. For that reason, I love the Furies too; they’re so wholly what they are, neither bad nor good – no one in the book is – everyone just is, both good and bad and blood and guts and beauty and horror all at once. The Oracle’s scenes were brief, but so fun to write because she’s so mischievous.

What does being on this year’s YA Book Prize shortlist mean to you?

The YA Book Prize does so much in terms of promoting and celebrating UKYA – almost no other organisation is championing UKYA books with even half of the Prize’s dedication. What makes it extra special from my perspective is that the YA Book Prize shines a light exclusively on books being published by authors in Britain and Ireland – so often UKYA talent is underrepresented commercially and promotionally, even here on its home turf, in the face of big US imports and heavy hitters, and all the circus and hype that comes with them. The fact the prize makes a point of focusing on homegrown talent and acknowledging that we are publishing some of the best books in the world, right here in the UK, feels rare and special, and it makes being shortlisted for it a real honour and privilege.

What’s the best thing about writing for young adults?

I feel like being a teenager comes at you so fast and there’s no schedule you can follow; one day you’re at school and everyone in your class is a dewy-eyed shrimp and the very next day your friend Oscar is two feet taller and has three hairs on his upper lip that might one day be a moustache, and then Emma suddenly has boobs and is making eyes at the Year 11 girls, and you’re still four feet tall, angry without understanding why, and wearing a bra you don’t actually need but it’s better than reliving last week in PE when everyone wanted to know why don’t you shave your legs yet.

Suddenly you’re sexually attracted to people, or you’re not but everyone else is, and while you’re grappling with that, you’re realising that your parents and teachers are fallible, messed up human beings, and that the systems that everyone’s following are largely arbitrary and deeply bureaucratic, but you’re going to be shoe-horned into following them anyway.

And then there’s the existential stuff: a mass extinction event underscored by forest fires and floods and hurricanes and heatwaves. Money and food and heating and the housing market and none of the people in charge – the “adults” – seem to be doing a thing about it, while you are on a conveyor belt ever closer to being spat out into that world and expected to thrive.

It’s awkward and smelly and horrible and weird and your body is betraying you constantly and so is your mind and so are your parents and so is the world.

But it’s also a time of becoming. There is no point in anyone’s life when they will remember anything as keenly as they will remember being a teenager; apparently because our strongest memories form between the ages of 10 and 30 – peaking at age 15 - but also because, for most teens and young adults, it’s the time of firsts and they tend to stick in the mind.

Not an exhaustive list, but you’re looking at first love, first heartbreak, first time losing friends, first time making decisions that will define the options you’ll have next and the (initial) direction of your life, first time making new friends outside your local social circle, first time getting a job, first time leaving home, first time voting. First time finding the music and films and television shows and books and culture that speaks to you and not your parents or teachers. First time consciously deciding who and how you’re going to be in the world and taking steps towards that. Almost everything is new and immediate for teenagers, more than any other generation they live in the present and the pressure that comes with that is staggering.

That’s why I write for them. I don’t know if it’s the best thing about writing for teenagers, but it’s why I do it. The only thing I want from writing YA is to write the book that makes the four-foot angry shrimp – the one who doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing – feel less alone.

I write for the misfits and the outcasts and the weirdos in the hope they read my books and in them find something that makes them feel seen and known, and less alone. If I managed to do that, then that’s the best thing about writing for teenagers. If I just get to the one kid who reads my characters and thinks: “Yes! That’s me! And it ends well so I’ll be OK too!” then that’s the best it can be.