Best seller won’t sell out her YA audience
Fans shouldn’t worry that after a stint working on a TV script she’ll abandon writing books, Juno Dawson tells Susie Mesure
“T vis like publishing onsteroids.i’m having a really good time[because]you canmakemoney offideasintvina way that you can’ t in publishing.”
Juno Dawson has the sort of face the fashion industry would love – and the sort of voice it would prefer not to hear. That’s because the bestselling Young Adult author has just written an unflinching expose of the darker side of fashion in her latest novel, Meat Market.
Despite being a writer not a model, Dawson gets asked to front campaigns. “Diversity is a big selling point now. The fact that I’m trans, the fact that I’m in my thirties, these are positives [in the fashion industry] in a way they just wouldn’t have been ten years ago,” she says.
Trans women are firm favourites on planet fashion, where women like Teddy Quinlan or Hari Nef are big names. But Dawson, 37, who started transitioning in 2014, warns brands need to do more than treat women – and men – as something ornamental.
“Brands have to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to diversity,” she says. “Don’t hire a black woman or a trans woman or a disabled woman and then get cross if they have opinions about their colour or their gender or their disability. The danger is if you’re hired just to be pretty but then you start having opinions about abortion, then you’re gonna get dropped. And of course you should be able to do both.” Dawson, who meets me en route from her home in Brighton to Manchester for a TV interview, recently posted on her private Facebook page that she’d turned down a request to be part of a fastfashion retailer’s Pride collection because she didn’t agree with its values.
“I’m in a privileged position
to be able to pick and choose and align myself with brands I would either use or I believe in,” she says.
Dawson, who used to be a teacher, first wanted to write about fashion when a former pupil got “scouted” aged just 11. “Her parents weren’t having it but I remember parking the idea.” Moving to London and making friends who worked in fashion – as scouts, photographers, re-touchers – cemented that urge.
The upshot is a pacy read about a 16-year-old from a south London council estate who gets scouted while on a school trip to Thorpe Park. Fame and fortune follow, as does a drug problem and a dark encounter with a sleazy photographer.
She has taken the themes of female exploitation further in a screenplay for a TV adaptation, which is her first experience of writing a script.
“TV is like publishing on steroids. I’m having a really good time [because] you can make money off ideas in TV in a way that you can’t in publishing.”
Fans shouldn’t worry that she will abandon writing books, however. A new novel will come out next year and she even has plans for a book aimed more squarely at adults after she realised her last title, Clean, was particularly popular with women in their early twenties.
Just don’t expect her to stray too far from her existing fanbase.
“Ever since my first novel, people have had quite a snippy vibe about YA, and it’s almost like: ‘Do you think one day you’ll write a real book?’ The irony is if I were to put out some sort of literary masterpiece, it would sell about 300 copies, versus Clean which has now done over 30,000 copies. So I think: ‘No, I’m all right doing what I’m doing!’”
n Meat Market is published by Hachette at £7.99. Juno Dawson will appear at the Edinburgh International Book Festival tomorrow.