UK YA Day is Silent Saturday!

Write it in big huge letters:

Today is UK YA Day, the day to celebrate young adult books by UK writers!

Loads of interesting things are going on today - check them out on Twitter via the #UKYADay hashtag! 

The fabulous @ProjectUKYA run by the tireless Lucy has all sorts of interesting things today including games and links to lots of #UKYA stuff. Writers and bloggers have written about their favourite UKYA books, what they love about UKYA and what they are reading at the moment. 

Check out this post from When I Was Joe and Salvage author Keren David: It's UKYA Day

You might also want to check out the brilliant UKYA website that Keren mentions. The website is run and maintained by authors Keris Stainton, Susie Day and Keren herself. They've put a huge amount of work into it, and it's a fantastic resource for anyone who loves YA (this means adults who are no longer exactly *cough* "young" too...) especially if it comes from our fab home grown authors. You can search for UKYA titles by location and genre - so if you've read something you've really loved and want to find something similar, it's a great place to start looking. 

I'm a relative newcomer to UKYA because although I was born and brought up in the UK, all my novels to date are set abroad, and up until 2011 I actually lived abroad. So apart from my passport, there wasn't very much that was "UK" about me. I'm delighted to be living and writing in Scotland now and to be waving the flag for brilliant UK books (hmmm....if we go independent, I hope I won't be thrown out of UKYA again...). 

There's another reason why today (19th April) is special for me. Today is Silent Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter. My latest book (above) is named after this day, and you can find out why in this blog post: Silent Saturday is coming to get you! Because Easter is a moveable feast, Silent Saturday isn't on 19th April every year. It was pure coincidence that this year it happened to fall on the same day as UKYA Day. So I'm celebrating twice. 

I'm hoping to post some more stuff about Silent Saturday later today, but in the meantime, if you're on Twitter, do pop over there and see what is happening on #UKYADay! 

Above: We love ProjectUKYA!

PS You might like to check this out too - it's a free audio excerpt from Silent Saturday especially for UKYA Day! https://soundcloud.com/helen-grant-3/silent-saturday-ukya-day