Young Adult literature and #LoveOzYA: with Alice Boer-Endacott

In this episode, Emma is joined by Alice Boer-Endacott, a YA author, IB and VCE English tutor, and the secretary of the #LoveOzYA committee. Together they talk about Australian YA literature, its place and value in the classroom, and the enduring nature of some of the first Australian YA texts like Tomorrow, When The War Began and Looking For Alibrandi. For more about Alice’s monthly column, Ask Alice, visit www.loveozya.com.au. For a list of complementary reading to Emma and Alice’s discussion, head to the VATE Village website: http://www.vate.org.au/vate-village.

Alice is a Melbourne-based author with ten years of experience tutoring Secondary English for IB and VCE curricula across over 20 schools. In 2019, she joined the Committee of LoveOzYA, a group committed to promoting Young Adult books written by Australian authors to Australian readers. As both an Australian, and an author of Young Adult books, she knows firsthand the importance of a thriving local readership and literary landscape. In 2020, she became a part of the organising group behind OzAuthorsOnline, a digital platform for author events created in response to the lockdowns imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Her academic interest in the relationship between texts and readers resulted in an ‘accessibly academic’ short non-fiction book, Mirror, Mirror, published in December 2020 by Debut Books, and has seen her start a PhD in 2021.