Stephenie Meyer’s debut novel, Twilight, was published in 2005 – the first in a series that went on to sell over 100 million copies worldwide. Twenty years, six novels and five movie adaptations later, it is clear that Twilight has permanently changed the shape of young adult (YA) fiction.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, most of the successful YA titles tended to be coming-of-age stories, such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (1999), that focused on regular teenagers learning how to become independent. However, the popularity of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) primed a generation of readers for YA stories that embraced fantasy as a genre.
