Adaptation Updates, Book Award Finalists, and More YA Book News

• Looking for updates on the Heartstopper movie? Here’s everything Alice Oseman has to share so far.
• This is a little insider baseball for publishing nerds, but editor Sarah Barley launched her own imprint this year. You likely have heard or seen of the first book or two from the list already, as both YA titles have already become bestsellers.
• LaDarrion Williams has a new YA fantasy series in the works.
• Billy Ray, one of the minds behind the adaptation of The Hunger Games, has published his first YA novel, which is a dystopian spin on Romeo and Juliet. Spoiler alert is that yes, in this piece he talks about how beyond The Hunger Games series, he hasn’t read much YA. Folks who write YA and have industry connections but don’t care about the category rub me wrong.
• We Were Liars season two has added a new series regular.
• Speaking of We Were Liars, author E. Lockhart has a new book coming out this fall. Here’s what it’s called and what it’s about.
• Fake Dates & Mooncakes has been optioned for film adaptation.
• Season 3 of XO, Kitty is coming. Here’s everything to know about the next series of episodes.
• Beyond the Paddock, an independently published YA novel that released last spring, is being optioned for a YA TV series.
• As part of Hulu’s push to develop more teen-centric content, they’ve acquired Capsized by Charlotte Lillie Balogh for adaptation. The novel doesn’t release until September.
• Love classic YA horror of the 90s? Then you’re going to be thrilled to hear that Christopher Pike’s Remember Me is getting a new adaptation that’ll be available on Tubi.
• In what continues to be a series of stories about YA adaptations that are not especially diverse, here’s some more good news: Liara Tamani’s YA novel This Ain’t Our First Rodeo was optioned for a Hulu series adaptation.
• Check out the finalists in the young adult category for the International Thriller Award.
• In 2022, a new paperback boxed set of Pretty Little Liars hit the market and now, in 2026, some readers have noticed that references in those editions have been updated. It’s causing FEELINGS on the internet. It’s really common for books like this to have those kinds of updates (see Forever . . . by Judy Blume, as one example). That people are infuriated over something that happened years ago and they just discovered now is wild. In their defense is the fact this update really reads like it’s trying way too hard. Do teens invite one another over to watch TikToks because in my experience, they just text or DM them to one another.
• This is a great conversation between Adib Khorram and Nathanael Lessore who talk about masculinity and writing YA books.
• Everything we know so far about the conclusion of Sabaa Tahir’s Heir duology.
• Check out the Indie Choice Awards shortlist, including a banger of a selection of YA fiction. These are the books that independent booksellers think are among the best of the best.
• In what’s bad news for young readers, the long-running Dial imprint at Penguin Random House has been shuttered. There was no warning this was coming. Some staff will be moved to different imprints, but what a mega loss for readers and authors.
• Australian YA author and Printz Honor award winner Craig Silvey now faces even more horrific child sexual exploitation charges.
• Read an excerpt of Rebekah Weatherspoon’s forthcoming sapphic YA novel, Summer Official.
• Here’s a great read about R.L. Stine and his writing career over the decades.
• In what might be one of the funniest judgments in any recent lawsuit, a court has cleared Tracy Wolff of plagiarism charges brought by another writer. “[H]ot, sexy, dangerous boys—central to virtually all young adult romance novels—cannot be copyrighted,” may be a little reductive, but that’s kind of the point in this case.
• The finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards have been announced, and the titles for the YA category are so good. Thrilled to see a small press represented with Rob Costello’s book.

It’s never too late to catch up with this year’s most anticipated YA books–many of these are already on shelves, so you can grab ’em now.