New Narratives, New Structures: Children’s and YA

Elle McNicoll is a bestselling and award-winning novelist. Her debut, A Kind of Spark, won the Blue Peter Book Award and the Overall Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, as well as Blackwell’s Book of 2020. She is Carnegie nominated, and was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Awards 2020, the Branford Boase Award and The Little Rebels Award.

Elle's second novel, Show Us Who You Are, was Blackwell’s Book of the Month and one of The Bookseller’s Best Books of 2021. She is an advocate for better representation of neurodiversity in publishing, and currently lives in East London.

Aimée Felone is managing director of Knights Of – a commercial children’s publisher whose main focus is publishing inclusively by commissioning writers and illustrators from a diverse range of backgrounds, as well as hiring diversely. At Knights Of she has opened Brixton’s only children’s bookshop, Round Table Books, which exclusively stocks titles from underrepresented authors and illustrators.

Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold is an Associate Professor at the University of Glasgow, where she teaches and researches children's and YA literature and book culture. Her research specialism is Inclusive Youth Literature and Book Culture, with a particular focus on the representation of people of colour, and the experiences of authors and readers of colour.

Melanie has published widely on the topic; alongside numerous publications about contemporary book culture. Her book Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom, 2006-2016, was published by Palgrave in 2019. Melanie’s interests in Youth Literature and Book Culture extends beyond academia. She was a judge on the UKYA book prize and the Scottish Teenage Book Prize, and is on the Advisory Boards for the CLPE Reflecting Realities project, the Pop-up Pathways into Children’s Publishing project, and Literature Alliance Scotland, and works with a number of cultural organisations across the UK.

Dr Denise Chapman is a counternarrative storyteller, spoken word poet, and critical autoethnographer who lectures in children’s literature, early literacy, and inclusive children’s media at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Dr Chapman has served as a literacy specialist focused on critical media literacy in Australia, Fiji, and the United States. Denise uses oral stories, children’s literature, poetry, and digital images as counternarrative windows for social disruption and liberation. She is currently exploring preservice teachers experiences with diverse transmedia stories for children, and how teachers consider the impacts of diverse stories on children’s imagined possibilities. Collecting and analysing children’s literature, poetry, and short films centring the Global African experience serve as a favourite pastime for Denise.

Her most recent publication entitled 'The Crooked Room: Intersectional tap dancing, Academic Performing, and Negotiating Black, woman, Immigrant' is a critical poetic autoethnography that shares her wayfinding experience as an African American woman academic working in a White-privileged Australian university, trying to survive systems of oppression unacknowledged by those within the university space.

In an upcoming edited book by Dr Jeff Share entitled Ecowriting in Every Classroom, Denise discusses the freedoms and conscious-raising connections that stories lend to those experiencing oppression, as stories can help us fly.

Marisa Pintado is the Publishing Director at Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing. She has worked in children's and YA books for more than 15 years and currently works and lives on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne.

In 2012 Marisa founded the Ampersand Prize, one of Australia’s leading awards for debut novelists, and recently established the Bright Light Books imprint at Hardie Grant, to publish books about resilience, diversity, ability, empathy and change for young children.

Marisa has published a wide range of best-selling and award-winning titles for children and teenagers, including Welcome to Your Period and Welcome to Consent by women’s and adolescent health experts Dr Melissa Kang and Yumi Stynes; the Real Pigeons series, which is being adapted to film and TV by Nickelodeon; the School of Monsters series by beloved children’s author Sally Rippin; and the Explore Your World series with environmentalist Dr Tim Flannery.

Erin is the owner of The Kids' Bookshop and a practising Teacher Librarian. She spent almost 10 years working in publishing, followed by many years as a children's bookseller and librarian. Erin has been a judge for the CBCA Awards, is a regular contributor to Books + Publishing and was recently appointed to the board of the Melbourne Writer's Festival.