Melvin Burgess and Pete Kalu

Melvin Burgess has been writing fiction for young people since his first book, The Cry of the Wolf, was published in 1990. His 1996 novel Junk kick-started the YA genre and achieved great acclaim at home and abroad. It won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, the Carnegie Medal and was  voted one of the top ten Carnegie winners ever.  He has won many other awards over the years, including the LA YA Book of the Year Award for Doing It. He has continued to publish popular, controversial and cutting edge fiction for young people ever since.

His latest YA, ‘Three Bullets, was published in 2021, in which year he also published Count, for younger children, illustrated by Chris Mould. His first adult book Loki, came out in May 2022.

Pete Kalu 

Pete Kalu’s  short stories range in style from the realist to the surreal to the carnivalesque and can be found in various anthologies including Collision (comma press 2023), Glimpse (Peepal Tree 2023), Lancashire Stories (Lancashire Libraries 2023), Getting Home (The Proofreader’s Sigh) Closure (Peepal Tree 2015), Seaside Special (Bluemoose 2018) and A Country To Call Home (Unbound 2017).

His science fiction short story, Doppelganger can be found in the Manchester Review July 2017.  His YA alternative reality novel One Drop (Andersen Press) was published in 2022. He writes occasional book reviews that can be found at  www.peterkalu.com and his Twitter / X handle is @peterkalu. He is too old for Instagram.