Louise O'Neill: You can write about anything you want but remember ‘first, do no harm’
Louise O'Neill. Picture: Moya Nolan
I WAS first published in 2014, a year after the author Kevin Brooks was awarded the Carnegie Medal for his novel, The Bunker Diary, about a teenager who is captured, imprisoned, and tortured. It was a controversial choice, prompting numerous think-pieces and panel discussions about the state of Young Adult (YA) fiction, asking if it had become ‘too dark’.
Given the rather bleak nature of my own debut, perhaps it was not surprising I was asked to participate in some of these conversations. My argument then, as it is today, is that that a YA author could write about whatever they wanted — I couldn’t think of any topic I believed should be off limits — as long as it was done in a responsible manner.
