On a recent trip to Macedonia I was asked, by a fellow Australian traveller: is there really a need for Young Adult (YA) fiction or is it just a marketing gimmick?

As a fifteen-year-old and a compulsive reader I consume a lot of novels tagged ‘YA’, but when confronted with this question I was stumped (and, I admit, a little defensive). This was not the first time I had heard YA described or dismissed as no more than a publishing ploy to access a new market. Which I guess, it is.