Diversity in young adult fiction

For a large portion of history, young adult fiction focused on cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied characters and authors.[9] In the 1920s and 1930s, "diverse" children's stories emphasized stereotypical characteristics of people of color. The 1940s sparked a change in the conversation surrounding black narratives. Those in black communities began demanding the publishing of books that actually depicted their lives.[10] In 1965, Nancy Larrick published the article "The All-White World of Children's Publishing", which analyzed the literature and found that only 6.4 percent of the more than 5,000 books published for children between 1962 and 1964 featured children of color.[11] A year later, the Council on Interracial Books for Children, which demanded that more books be published by people of color, was created.[12]

Diversity in the pre-1980s era was not limited only to racial diversity. In 1969, John Donovan published I'll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip, which was the first young adult novel to feature a gay teen.[13] In 1979, Rosa Guy published Ruby, which became the first young adult novel featuring a lesbian woman of color.[13]

The 1980s brought a greater awareness to the need for diverse youth literature. The population in the United States of America became much more diverse: the Hispanic population more than doubled and the population of races other than white or black increased exponentially.[14] The publishing industry took notice of demographic changes and became more vocal about representation. In 1985, the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) began to track the percentage of books written by African American authors. That year, they reported that African Americans authored less than 1 percent of all children's books. In 1994, the organization began to track the number of Asian and Pacific Islander, Native and Latino authors as well. In their report, the CCBC found that, collectively, authors of color published about 9 percent of all books directed towards children and young adults. By the end of the millennium, that percentage dropped to 6.3 percent.[1]

The young adult market bloomed in the 2000s, largely in response to some high-profile, bestselling YA series (such as Twilight and The Hunger Games) and their subsequent film adaptations.[7] In the late 1990s, only 3,000 young adult books were published annually. By 2010, that number increased to 30,000.[15] While the number of diverse books has increased, the numbers are not reflective of the demographic breakdown in the United States and the United Kingdom.[9] The statistics gathered by the CCBC and various other independent researchers show that the market does not reflect the diversity of the U.S.[9] In 2013, less than 9 percent of best-selling novels featured characters with disabilities.[16] In 2014 and 2015, found that 85 percent of all children's and young adult books feature white characters. This statistic has remained fairly stagnant since the 1960s.[17] In 2017, a 20-year analysis of National Book Award winners between 1996 and 2015 found that only five of the novels were written by non-white authors.[11]

In 2014, spurred by an all-white, all-male discussion at the 2014 BookCon festival, young adult author Ellen Oh created the Twitter hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks to protest the lack of diversity in young adult and children's literature.[3] This movement developed into the nonprofit organization We Need Diverse Books (WNDB). WNDB's goal is to increase the representation of diverse communities within the world of children's books.[18]

This movement changed the conversation surrounding diversity in YA and has influenced the number of diverse options on the market today.[19] In the UK, 90 percent of the best-selling YA titles from 2006 to 2016 featured white, able-bodied, cisgender, and heterosexual main characters.[20] During this period, 8 percent of all young adult authors published in the UK were people of colour.[20] This number increased in the subsequent years. In the UK the proportion of authors of colour writing for young adults in the UK has more than doubled between 2017 and 2019. In 2017, 7.10 percent of YA authors were people of colour: this rose to 19.60 percent in 2019.[7] Between 2007 and 2017 in the UK, fewer than 9 percent of children's books creators were people of colour.[21] Authors of colour have proved to have commercial appeal, despite not being offered the same types of publishing deals and opportunities as their white counterparts: in the 2017–2019 period, women authors of colour and white women authors accounted for 30.75 percent each on the YA bestseller list in the UK, but 9.02 percent and 58.3 percent, respectively, of the overall publishing output. This means that despite there being around six times as many White women being published than women of colour, there are the same number of both groups in the bestseller list,[7] In 2017, a quarter of children's novels from US publishers were about minority protagonists, almost a 10 percent increase from 2016.[1]