Martyn Bedford is the author of five novels for adults - Acts of Revision (Bantam Press 1996); Exit, Orange & Red (Bantam Press 1997); The Houdini Girl (Penguin 1999); Black Cat (Penguin 2001) and The Island of Lost Souls (Bloomsbury 2006). Between them they have been translated into 12 languages. Flip, his first novel for teenagers and young adults, will be published in spring 2011. Martyn is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Leeds Trinity University College and lives in West Yorkshire with his wife and two daughters.
I have a former editor to thank for my first novel for teenagers . . . I wrote it because he advised me not to. Back in 2005, he took me out to lunch to celebrate the deal to publish The Island of Lost Souls, my fifth novel. We went to Pizza Express in Leeds. Towards the end of the meal he asked what I planned to write next. Up to then all my novels had been for adults, straddling the border between mainstream literary fiction and psychological thriller. But I’d had an idea for a story more suited to a teenage and young-adult audience. When I mentioned this, the editor shook his head.
‘You don’t want to write one of those.’
Read the full article in the April issue of Words with JAM
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