STORIES TELL

Meet the budding Singaporean authors taking the young adult genre - and the world by storm

- Sabrina Low and Amanda Goh

KYLA ZHAO

The young adult fiction genre continues to dominate book sales worldwide, and it has been the fastest-growing category over the past five years. A stylistic feature of the genre is an open and approachable narrative, one that tends to follow a familiar structure—and this translates to instant escapist reading due to its digestibility.

Cue the pandemic, and as borders began to close and people were forced into varying degrees of isolation and anxiety, an overwhelming sense of ennui slowly crept into the world. A plight shared by many, young author Kyla Zhao suddenly found herself isolated, away from family while at university in the US, with social media as her only form of connection with the rest of the world.

Zhao sought solace in writing her first book The Fraud Squad during the lockdown, setting out to pen a story where “the Asian diaspora was portrayed in a more joyful and vibrant way”, a refreshing change from the negative media coverage on the news cycle. The inspiration for the novel came from a desire to escape the tedium of the pandemic, and Zhao strived to create an upbeat and lighthearted tale in hopes of distracting herself from the dreary state of things then.

Drawing on her past experiences working at publications, including the Singapore editions of Tatler and Vogue, Zhao crafts a fictitious world of grand parties and socialites embroiled in scandal in her hometown of Singapore. “Writing about my favourite local places and foods helped me cope with my homesickness and loneliness during lockdown in California,” she shares.