Authorgraph No.222


I


meet Juno Dawson in the artisan bakery-café in Hove where she writes, accompanied by her adored chihuahua Prince (who, banned from Dawson’s lap by the café management’s ‘paws on the floor’ policy, instead makes lickily enthusiastic attempts to befriend anyone who sits nearby). We meet just


before Christmas, at the end of what’s been a busy and transformative year for the former Queen of Teen. It’s included a name change, a bestselling World Book Day title, and a settling back into the city where her writing career kicked off, five years ago.


It was a long, damp school holiday here on the south coast that turned Dawson the primary school teacher into a writer. ‘I was so bored!’ she says, laughing. ‘It was 2008 and all I wanted to do was read on the beach but the weather was just not having it. My friends were all at work so I ended up sitting at home watching America’s Next Model on YouTube and going slowly mad.’ She pledged that the following year would be different – and the result was Hollow Pike, her first published novel. A paranormal thriller about friendship, it was spurred by the shortcomings of Twilight.


‘It feels almost churlish to criticise Twilight,’ she says. ‘I think everything that can possibly be said about Twilight has been said about Twilight. But it did strike me that it was so much about a girl who was very wrapped up in her boyfriend. I vividly remember


Juno Dawson Interviewed


by Michelle Pauli


that at my school, all our fun and all our dramas were about friends, not boyfriends. The fact was that, in Twilight, Bella didn’t have any friends, so I thought maybe I’ll write a book about my friends and, since we spent a lot of our time at school wishing that we could develop powers so we would kill our bullies, I was kind of like, well, let’s do that then.’


Dawson swiftly got an agent and a bidding war for the book followed, eventually won by Orion, keen for Hollow Pike to spearhead its new Indigo YA list in 2012. While Dawson can, perhaps surprisingly, sound a little downbeat about the experience of publishing Hollow Pike (‘the unfortunate thing with Hollow Pike was that the train from supernatural town had very much departed and all anybody then wanted was Hunger Games-inspired stories’), it set her career off at a pace (‘the first couple of years did feel like being dragged behind a moving vehicle’) and sparked a move to a new publisher, Hot Key, for her next eight books, the latest of which is Margot and Me.


It’s a novel that may surprise those familiar with Dawson’s work so far, and Dawson admits that she’s ‘really, really worried’ about it. She needn’t be. However, she’s right that it’s ‘more ambitious, perhaps’ than previous books. It’s a gripping tale of the relationship between a wilful teenage girl and her equally strong-willed grandmother, set in rundown rural Wales and spanning two historical time periods more than 50 years apart, 1941 and 1998.


Resentful of having to leave behind her London life to stay with her cold, critical grandmother Margot, so that her chronically ill mother can recuperate in the countryside, and struggling to settle at her new school (which comes complete with nasty, flush-your-head-down- the-loo girls), Fliss sees the discovery of Margot’s wartime diary as a chance to get her own back. But, as Fliss delves deeper into Margot’s extraordinary story and life, and then has to deal with a tragedy of her own, the two women draw closer.


Dawson is clear that, although the wartime section includes a love affair, the book is not a historical romance: it’s a ‘love story about family’ and ‘a proper weepy’.


‘It occurred to me that there wasn’t a book in my life that I turned to in the way I would turn to the film The Notebook (starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams) on a rainy Sunday afternoon when you know that you’re not going to go out all day and you just want a really super-weepy love story, a Breakfast at Tiffany’s kind of thing. I wished there was something like that in a YA novel,’ explains Dawson.


10 Books for Keeps No.222 January 2017


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