Panel
2.45 PM – 3.45 PM
Celebrating Neurodiversity in YA! Neurodivergent stories matter and these authors are leading the way. Chaired by Fin Leary, join them, Elle McNicoll, Lucy Powrie, and Anna Zoe Quirke for a heartfelt and empowering discussion about writing authentically neurodivergent characters and the importance of representation in YA. From lived experience to creative inspiration, the panel explores how neurodiversity shapes their storytelling, challenges stereotypes, and creates space for every kind of mind.
About Anna Zoe Quirke
Anna Zoe Quirke is a queer and autistic author and librarian from the North of England. She currently lives in Manchester with her partner, Rachael, and their very angry tortoise, Sheldon. They're at their happiest writing stories about queer and neurodivergent people finding and claiming their place in the world, exploring the literary wonders of the UK, or making a big ol' mess in the kitchen baking things for their loved ones. Their debut novel Something to be Proud of was nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Writing.
About Elle McNicoll
Elle McNicoll's debut novel A Kind of Spark, won the Blue Peter Book Award and the Overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize, as well as Blackwell's Book of 2020. She is twice Carnegie nominated, and was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Awards 2020, the Branford Boase Award and The Little Rebels Award. Her novels have been published in the US and translated into multiple languages including Dutch, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Korean, Japanese, French and Turkish. A Kind Of Spark has been adapted for Television in partnership with 9Story and BBC Childrens, with the first season due to air in the UK and US in Spring 2023.
About Fin Leary
Fin Leary (they/he) is a trans and autistic author, program manager at We Need Diverse Books, and a faculty member at GrubStreet and Emerson College, where they teach in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department. Fin was a 2024 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ+ Voices Fellow for Young Adult Fiction. They were a 2024 Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree. Fin is the editor of the science fiction anthology Future States of Stars (OwlCrate Press, 2026). They are a contributor to the young adult horror anthology These Bodies Ain't Broken edited by Madeline Dyer (Page Street Publishing, 2025). Their work has been published in the anthology About Us edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, as well as the New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Refinery29, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, The Oprah Magazine, Vice, Teen Vogue, Healthline, and more. Fin lives with their orange literary cat and a rainbow bookshelf outside of Boston, Massachusetts.
About Lucy Powrie
Lucy Powrie is a neurodivergent author whose dream is to fill bookshelves with as many books featuring proudly autistic and ADHD characters as possible – just like her. She makes bookish videos as lucythereader to an audience of over 45,000 subscribers, and enjoys passionately sharing her love for old books, the Brontë sisters, and the 1995 BBC miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. When she's not writing or reading, she can be found cuddling her corgi, Margie, and looking after her herd of adorable guinea pigs.
