Interview with Bridget Hamilton and KL Kaine on their summer YA debuts

Bridget Hamilton: We Wait for the Stars centres around Celeste, a 17-year-old college student who is dealing with the loss of her dad alongside all of the normal stresses of teenage life – looming exams, applying for university and accidentally falling for her best friend’s boyfriend…

It isn’t autobiographical, but was definitely inspired by my own experience of losing my dad. I was surprised by how much grief can affect everything in your life – in both positive and negative ways – and wanted to write a story for teenagers that portrayed that in a realistic way.

It’s also a novel in verse, so if you’ve enjoyed books by Dean Atta or Sarah Crossan you will hopefully like this one!

KL Kaine: Blood of Gods and Girls is about a girl called Nisha who is chosen to the Mortal Goddess – the flesh and blood vessel for the great Goddess of her island. But what should be a blessing turns out to be a curse. It’s set in a rich, Asia-inspired fantasy world and features villages nestled in snowy mountains, cities built into dusty red canyons, a Golden Eagle Huntress and a very bad Holy Man.

It was inspired by my frustration at how I would see girls apologising for taking up space, and seeing themselves as less smart or capable than their male counterparts. Far from being the fault of these girls, they had been fed narratives their whole lives that had established these beliefs. I wanted to write a story which inspired them to question the narratives we’re given – the propaganda that we’ve been swimming in for so long, much of it received as undisputed fact.

The story changed dramatically over the years. An early version included a Pirate Queen, but an editor rightly told me that the story wasn’t big enough for both her and the Mortal Goddess. It was very painful to remove the Pirate Queen entirely from the story, but don’t worry – she has simply demanded her own story, and that’s the one I’m writing now…

Bridget Hamilton: When I won my Northern Writers’ Award, I hadn’t finished writing the book yet and was really grateful for the confidence boost that propelled me to finish it.

My category was judged by the literary agent Lucy Irvine (now at DA Children’s Agency) and so when I had a half-decent first draft I approached her first and she offered to represent me. Together we worked on polishing up the manuscript before going out on submission to publishers.

I signed a contract with Little Tiger in January 2025 and have been working with them on even more edits, cover designs and marketing plans ever since! I somewhat foolishly also had a baby in 2025 and so the past year has been a chaotic juggle of raising him whilst preparing for publication (and drinking a LOT of coffee).

KL Kaine: That Northern Writers’ Award was a particularly important part of my journey, because not only was it a boost I really needed in order to keep going after so many years of gruelling rejections, but on the day of the award ceremony, I actually got my first agent offer – after 13 years of trying!

So, the short answer to how my journey to publication has been, is: long. It took me 13 years to get an agent, but then I got the book deal in almost no time at all, but then came another long wait for actual publication – over two and a half years!

Over the period before I got agented, I wrote about a dozen books, and countless short stories. I even created my own software, the Novel Factory to help me with my process! When I really started making leaps forward was when I started getting feedback from other writers, and finding my writing tribe. After many years of getting nowhere, I started getting longlisted for competitions, and then I started getting shortlisted, and then I started winning!

But even then, it wasn’t an easy road, because the book that I won the most awards with – including the Northern Writers’ Award, The Bath Children’s Novel Award (shortlisted) and the SCBWI Undiscovered Voices Anthology – still couldn’t get me an agent. That was the hardest part – feeling like I was so close, but then still not quite getting there.

But at that point I did some serious soul searching, and realised that I would keep writing even if I would never get published, and in that fickle way the Universe has, once I knew that for myself, that’s when I got my agent and book deal.

Bridget Hamilton: I hope readers will feel seen when they read We Wait for the Stars, particularly if they themselves have lost someone close to them.

I hope they laugh at the funny moments as much as they tear up at the meaningful moments – I wouldn’t describe it as a sad novel, it’s sweet and funny and irreverent.

And I hope that readers appreciate the gorgeousness of the landscape that I’ve tried to weave through the verse. Lots of reviews have mentioned how much the North East is celebrated in it, which has made me very happy!

KL Kaine: The main theme of the book is the narratives that girls and women are given, and how it shapes what we believe we should be and what we believe we are capable of.

Girls are told that they should be nice, kind, helpful, sweet, pretty, delicate, agreeable. I believe that girls internalise these messages and those beliefs limit their entire lives. And I don’t believe that is the truth of women and girls, I believe that is propaganda from the patriarchy, which keeps us in place and compliant.

I would love for girls to start pulling back the veil, and finding out more about how they can be fulfilled and claim their fair share of society, by going on to read books such as Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, Women who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés and The Body Myth by Milli Hill. These books show how the world has been built by men, for men, and show examples of how women have been so much more throughout history than the narrow mould we are squeezed into today.

Bridget Hamilton: I’ve always loved reading YA but it wasn’t a genre I always knew I wanted to write in. When I first had the idea for We Wait for the Stars I was working a lot with young people in school and youth group settings as a creative producer, and so I was reading a lot of YA to understand what the groups I was working with were reading. I stole The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta and Clap When you Land by Elizabeth Acevedo from the library of one schools I was working in (with permission from the librarian, of course!) and absolutely loved them. Then the stars suddenly seemed to align and I thought… this story should be for young people, and it should be in verse. I didn’t look back after that!

KL Kaine: I’m not sure – I don’t think I set out to write a Young Adult book, I just wrote the story I wanted to read, and I’m quite heavily influenced by Buffy and Disney… I have a sense of wonder at the world which is more commonly shared with children than adults and I like including fun, lighter elements.

Many YA books are about coming of age, and discovering who you are, especially if that means breaking out of the expectations your parents and society at large might have for you. From that point of view Blood of Gods and Girls fits very naturally into that genre, with the added layer of stepping into her power. And of course there was my motivation at reaching out to girls and young women, and inspiring them to ask more questions and value themselves more.

Having said that, I do believe it’s a strong crossover read (and have had that confirmed by quite a few adults!) that can be enjoyed by people of all ages, as it contains rich world building, a twisty plot and can be read on multiple levels.

Bridget Hamilton: I was in the generation of teenagers who queued up outside bookshops at midnight for the newest book in a certain wizarding series! I remember being obsessed with Jacqueline Wilson in my pre-teen years, and then I had a bit of a classics phase and read To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Brave New World… My dad was big into Terry Pratchett so I would often read the Pratchett book he’d just finished so we could chat about it. I also loved Tim Bowler, who I think often gets overlooked when we look back at YA authors of the early 2000s, but has written some absolute gems (and won the Carnegie Medal in 1997). My tastes were clearly a bit eclectic!

KL Kaine: Yes, I was the stereotypical shy, bookish girl!

Key books I remember reading as a teen are Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High and Point Horrors and then as I got older, His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, and anything by Robin Hobb.

A couple of books that influenced my views as a feminist when I was a young adult were How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran and The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan.

Bridget Hamilton: I think we can all be a bit snobby about reading. We think we have to read something terribly highbrow or literary or that it must be a certain genre / length. My top tip would be to forget all of that and read whatever makes you happy. Rediscover something you loved as a child. Take something totally different out of the library or find something weird at the bottom of a box in a charity shop. Try a graphic novel or a novel in verse!

And embrace putting down a book you aren’t really enjoying. If I don’t finish a book it’s so rarely because it isn’t good. I’ll often put it aside, pick it up again later and really love it.

KL Kaine: The main thing for me is that reading should be fun. I have so many books on my ‘to be read’ (TBR) shelf, that sometimes it can feel like a weight, a chore that needs to be completed, and that’s a shame. I recently heard a view from Oliver Burkeman I really liked, which was that instead of seeing your TBR as a to do list which you must complete, to see it as a river running past you, and that every now and then, you can dip into the waters and take out a treat.

Personally, I am trying to spend more time reading rather than on social media or YouTube, because I notice how much clearer my head is when I stay away from those things, and how frazzled I feel when I do spend time on them. I believe we’re in a bit of a wild west when it comes to the harm our devices are doing to our mental health and society, much like when cigarette companies had free rein to advertise themselves as healthy. Someone recently asked me if I agreed with the idea to ban social media for under 16s, and I replied yes, and that we should ban it for over 16s too!

I also really liked how the owner of Truman Books invited people to a ‘Big Read’ in a grassy area near the bookshop. She put a call on social media (okay, so it can have its uses!), inviting people to come along if they wanted to read together in the sunshine, and had no idea if anyone would turn up – and they came in droves. Making reading a community thing to do fills my heart with joy, and having children running around, surrounded by reading adults, gives them the model they need to see that reading is positive and fun.