Martyn Bedford - Writer

I’m very flattered to hear that Flip has been included on a list of Good Books Not To Be Missed by the international Kids’ Lit Quiz organisation. The reading list, compiled by KLQ’s founder and globe-trotting quizmaster, Wayne Mills, is aimed at advanced teenage readers and includes novels by some of the leading authors in contemporary young-adult fiction – Patrick Ness, Mark Haddon, Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer, Mal Peet, Siobhan Dowd and Charlie Higson, to name just a few. I’m honoured to be in their company. I had the pleasure of meeting Wayne a couple of years ago when I was the guest author at a regional heat of the Kids’ Lit Quiz – a brilliant annual competition aimed at promoting reading among children aged 10-13, in which thousands of teams from schools in the UK, Australia, the USA, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa compete for a place in the grand final.

I’ve read 12 of the books on the list in the For Advanced Readers category and they include some of my favourite teen/YA fiction of recent years – Elsewhere; Gone; The Knife of Never Letting Go; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Impossible; Stolen and The Book Thief.

Here’s the list in full:

Elsewhere, Gabrielle Zevin.
Maggot Moon, Sally Gardner.
Gone, Michael Grant.
The Alchemyst, Michael Scott.
The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon.
Flip, Martyn Bedford.
Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins.
Impossible, Nancy Werlin.
Spud, John Van de Ruit.
Twilight, Stephenie Meyer.
Stolen, Lucy Christopher.
Bog Child, Siobhan Dowd.
Exposure, Mal Peet.
The Enemy, Charlie Higson.
The Year the Gypsies Came, Linzi Glass.
Set in Stone, Linda Newbery.
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak.
Lockdown, Alexander Gordon Smith.
The Poison Garden, Sarah Singleton.
Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld.