Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Amy Burge, Associate Professor in Popular Fiction, University of Birmingham

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.

The stage was set for Twilight to emerge, combining YA romance and coming-of-age narratives with supernatural characters. Whereas Rowling and Pullman subordinated romance for adventure stories, Meyer made romance central to her plot, winning a vast readership among adolescent girls – and not a few adult women.

Following Twilight’s success, similar books flooded the market, leading to a decade-long YA paranormal romance boom. Among many examples were L.J. Smith’s Vampire Diaries series, originally published in the early 1990s but re-imagined in 2009 with new novels and a TV adaptation. And there was Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series (2007-2010), which was subsequently adapted into a film (2014) and television series (2022).

Suddenly, sexy vampires were everywhere – to the joy of many YA readers, and the alarm of many critics.

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This article is part of a mini-series marking 20 years since the publication of Stephenie Meyer’s first Twilight novel.

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During the years of its greatest popularity, from 2008-12, everyone seemed to have an opinion on the Twilight series, including journalists and academics.

While Twilight clearly struck a chord with its fans, it was widely critiqued in the media for what were perceived to be its regressive depictions of race and gender. Such critiques often combined feminist concerns over dangerous messages the series might convey to its readers with a reflexive scorn for romance media that lent into traditional gender roles – and for the women who enjoyed it.

Despite (or because of) its vast popularity, Twilight was dismissed by some as “bad literature”. Fans of the series became the butt of a joke, caricatured as impressionable illiterates who needed to be saved from their own bad taste – and their assumed inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

Consequently, many readers who devoured the books in their early teens distanced themselves from the franchise as they got older. They appeared keen to disavow any association with a series condemned as both aesthetically and ideologically worthless.

Twilight’s impact on YA fiction

Not everyone liked Twilight, but its impact was such that no author writing YA fiction could afford to ignore it. Indeed, much 2010s YA fiction can be understood as a mass of Twilight rewritings.

In these books, the same elements repeatedly appear – supernatural boyfriends, love triangles, seemingly-normal-but-actually-special heroines – but rearranged by each author to provide whatever they felt Twilight didn’t offer.

Even Meyer published two response novels to her original trilogy that addressed criticisms about their gender roles. Life and Death (2015) is a gender-swapped retelling of Twilight, featuring new characters, and Midnight Sun (2020) recounts the events of Twilight from vampire Edward Cullen’s point of view. Meyer was, in essence, writing fan fiction of her own works.

Much of the reader-response to Twilight emerged through fan fiction. Twilight is consistently one of the most popular fandoms: in August 2025, there were 13,067 fan fiction works based on the Twilight book series on Archive of Our Own, an open-source fan fiction archive. Some 1,814 of these works have been written or updated in 2025.

Famously, one such Twilight fan fiction – Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James – went on to become the fastest-selling novel in history on its release in 2011.

While the 2010s saw a reaction against Twilight, in the 2020s it has experienced a revival, as the books and (especially) films are being discovered by a new generation who interpret them as camp classics. As one modern Twilight fan on Reddit writes:

Twilight has dialogues that hold the power of making each and every one of us cringe – it’s amazing. We laugh because it’s so cringey. We love it because it so cringey. It’s iconic.

The YA publishing industry has also changed enormously. In 2005, the fact that Twilight openly courted an adolescent female readership made it a target for mockery. Today, that same demographic is the most coveted audience in publishing, and YA and “new adult” romances dominate the bestseller charts.

Modern YA fiction is far more diverse than it was in 2005, but there is still a clear line of descent from Twilight to the viral sensation A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (2015), and to the modern romantasy genre.

Adult concerns over adolescent reading habits persist, and the critiques of 2020s romantasy as “fairy porn” closely mirror the attacks made on paranormal romance 20 years ago. But despite such criticism, modern YA fiction is to a great extent still the industry that Twilight created – one in which romance plots are foregrounded, female protagonists are the norm, and supernatural elements taken from the traditionally male-dominated genres of science fiction and fantasy are repurposed to tell stories by, for and about women.

Any comparison of the genre before and after Twilight makes clear how huge its influence has been. You might legitimately criticise Twilight’s prose style, its gender politics or its handling of race, but after 20 years, there is no doubt as to the extent of its legacy.

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This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Twilight at 20: how Stephenie Meyer’s vampire saga changed young adult fiction forever – https://theconversation.com/twilight-at-20-how-stephenie-meyers-vampire-saga-changed-young-adult-fiction-forever-263459

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jason Gilchrist, Lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences, Edinburgh Napier University

A century ago, half a million rhinos roamed Africa and Asia. Today, just 27,000 remain.

The latest annual State Of The Rhino report, released this week by the International Rhino Foundation, shows no dramatic declines in population numbers in the past year. On the surface, this might seem like good news: after decades of poaching, habitat loss and trafficking, rhino numbers are holding steady.

But that stability masks something darker. We may be falling victim to what conservation scientists call “shifting baseline syndrome”, where our expectations deteriorate over time as conditions get worse. Accepting 27,000 as a new normal – something to be celebrated, even – could spell disaster for the long-term future of the rhino.

The report tracks population estimates, threats and conservation progress for all five rhino species:

In Africa, black rhinos numbers have risen slightly to 6,788 (from 6,195), a welcome recovery from the 1990s when they plummeted to just 2,300. But as recently as 1960 there were more than 100,000. White rhinos, the most numerous species, fell to 15,752 (from 17,464). This continues a long-term decline, despite continued efforts to reduce poaching.

In Asia, greater one-horned rhino edged up to 4,075 (from 4,014), but the number of Sumataran rhinos remains perilously low at between 34 and 47, while Javan rhinos have crashed to 50 down from 76 due to illegal hunting.

The report also highlights concerns that rhinos in South Africa – home to most of the world’s rhinos – face long-term genetic risks from inbreeding and will struggle to adapt to change. South Africa’s rhino now survive only in fenced reserves, unable to roam naturally, and therefore live mostly in isolated small populations.

Radioactive rhino horn

The lack of encouraging increases in rhino populations is concerning, as governments and conservationists have made serious efforts to tackle poaching. In South Africa in particular, rhino have been translocated (sometimes by helicopter) to somewhere safer, they’ve had their horns removed, or laced with poison, and/or microchipped, or fitted with GPS trackers. Some are even under guard from dedicated military-grade anti-poaching teams.

Arguably, these actions have had some effect in stemming the loss of African rhino to poachers. But rhino horn is worth so much on the illegal market (between about US$11,000 and US$22,000, or £8,000 to £16,000, per kilogram) that the illegal killing continues.

So, what next? The latest application of tech is injecting harmless radioactive isotopes into rhino horn to help customs officials detect trafficked horns at borders. This won’t stop poachers killing rhino. But it should make life more difficult for illegal trafficking syndicates.

The case of John Hume

The report is published amid a fresh scandal in South Africa, the epicentre of both rhino conservation and rhino crime.

John Hume, a South African businessman, was the world’s largest private rhino owner with 2,000 animals. He was controversial, as he publicly advocated for an end to the national and international bans on the sale of rhino horn.

Financial difficulties led to Hume selling his herd to NGO African Parks in 2023. Now, he and other alleged syndicate members face charges of fraud and theft over the illegal trafficking of nearly 1,000 rhino horns. Cases like this highlight the scale of the alleged organised crime networks driving the trade – and why it is so hard to police across borders.

What next for rhino?

To save the rhino, we’ll need to disrupt all parts of the illegal rhino horn chain, prevent and catch poachers and traffickers, and put the kingpins behind transnational syndicates out of commission. However, the most impactful long-term action remains comparatively under-resourced: reducing demand.

Large-scale, long-term, well-backed “demand reduction” campaigns to deter ownership and use of rhino horn are needed, especially in Asia where demand is highest. It may take years to shift attitudes. But demand reduction is much safer. Rangers, anti-poaching team members and poachers themselves have all been killed in the protection and pursuit of rhino in the African savanna.

Most importantly, we must not give up. Recovery is possible. For instance, white rhinos bounced back from under 200 animals to over 20,000 before a poaching resurgence this century. With enough resources and effort, rhinos could thrive again.

For the sake of the rhino, their ecosystems and us, we need to reverse habitat loss, bring rhino together into larger healthier populations, and undermine poaching and trafficking of rhino horn. Ultimately, the goal is to bring rhino back from the brink of extinction and toward historical baseline population sizes.

If we accept today’s numbers as “normal”, we risk condemning rhinos to at best permanent near-extinction, with populations only ever a bad government or anarchic war, or a poaching spike or natural disaster, away from being wiped out. And if we can’t save such a huge, charismatic and ecologically important animal, what hope for other species?

Jason Gilchrist does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The near-extinction of rhinos is at risk of being normalised – https://theconversation.com/the-near-extinction-of-rhinos-is-at-risk-of-being-normalised-265792

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dan Nicolau, Reader, Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, King’s College London

A £150 billion technology prosperity deal between the US and the UK was announced during President Donald Trump’s recent state visit to the UK.

But what kinds of technologies could it advance and how will these benefit the British public?

The Conversation asked Dr Dan Nicolau, who researches the interface of biology and computing, medical science and artificial intelligence (AI), at King’s College London for his thoughts.

AI has been the focus of this deal, but what other technologies could it benefit?

It’s a large amount of money, even for a wealthy medium-sized country like the UK. The big unknown is whether the various technical challenges associated with these technologies are overcome. It’s a big bet. It’s important if you want to see big economic benefits over the next ten years, say.

Those challenges include hallucinations by AI, where they invent information. The other thing relates to whether we have enough electricity. The government could build nuclear power plants. But that’s a big commitment over many years.

It’s also not totally clear that some of these tech advances directly translate to economic growth. There’s a quantum computing component to this deal and it’s directed towards developing lots of new medicinal drugs.

It’s not completely clear that if you had 100 new drugs for cancer that you would have the capacity to do the clinical trials to see that they worked. Maybe AI can accelerate the clinical trials but all of this is a big question mark. It’s a big bet that we can solve these problems in three to four years so we can get some economic growth over the next ten years.

Occasionally, there is some big breakthrough with quantum computing. Last year, Google announced that it had built a processor that drastically reduces the errors that quantum computers are prone to. But it’s not clear that running quantum computers at very cold temperatures or scaling or reducing the error rates translate into concrete breakthroughs. It might do, but it’s a little bit of a gamble. We don’t necessarily know if we’ll have answers in the next five years, but I think we’ll know a lot more in the next two.

Of the potential technologies, such as self-driving cars, drones and advanced chips, which could yield real benefits to people?

The question is about timescale. If I knew that I had a drug that could cure breast cancer or lung cancer, say. Even if I could prove that scientifically, it would be ten years before anyone could receive that drug. That’s because I’d have to publish the paper, it would have to be tested in mice, then clinical trials in humans.

In other areas, like for example, accounting, planning, contracts in law – all of that stuff, things can be done now. Some things can be done so much faster, it’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be major economic impact in two years. Because AI tools are able to accelerate writing computer code, I think that’s an area where we’d see half of code, maybe, being automated in the next two years. Whether that’s good for people in coding jobs, let’s see.

With drones, there are a couple of challenges – they can’t operate alone so they need constant human supervision. We’re working on a project where we’re trying to upload a fly brain into a drone. The fly already knows how to fly so if you put its brain into a drone, the drone will be able to fly on its own. AI tools can really help with that and making cheap, genuinely autonomous drones and other things like mini submarines for example.

Also, drones can only operate for short periods of time. So if AI tools were able to help them recharge on their own or share tasks, they could go from something that’s used by hobbyists and the military to self-driving cars, drug delivery to people at home, all of that stuff becomes much much easier. It opens up infrastructure development for drones, like highways in the sky specifically for drones. The potential economic openings are huge, but each of them has a question mark over them.

How likely is it that some of these problems can be overcome, do you think?

The billion pound question. With the hallucination problem with AI, there is no viable solution on the horizon. There are lots of patches and some of them are quite clever.

We don’t understand the reason hallucinations are happening because it’s a science problem and there are hardly any scientists working on it. OpenAI has 100 scientists in that team and 1,000 engineers. Google is the same. The engineers can’t fix it because it’s not an engineering problem.

But it’s wider than that. LLMs will provide answers based on the data that they’ve been fed, but they’re missing common sense. Until these problems are solved they’re not going to be able to operate without loads of human oversight.

Dan Nicolau does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How US-UK tech deal could yield significant benefits for the British public – expert Q&A – https://theconversation.com/how-us-uk-tech-deal-could-yield-significant-benefits-for-the-british-public-expert-qanda-265707

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sarah Olive, Senior Lecturer in Literature, Aston University

As pupils head back to school, they may well encounter Shakespeare’s plays and poems – perhaps for the first time.

I have written about books on Shakespeare’s life or plays for children and young adults for the last three years: fiction and fact, picturebooks and graphic novels, early readers to full-blown novels. Here are my top ten texts that take Shakespeare, run with him, and sweep up readers as they go.

Authors writing about Shakespeare for young people are surprisingly consistent in sticking to widely accepted scholarship. Authors’ notes often acknowledge the academic research that inspired them.

Readers are likely to come away from these books with greater understanding of Shakespeare, some pressing questions about him, and – above all – the experience of reading for pleasure. They are listed roughly in order of reading age.

1. The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard by Gregory Rogers, 2004

The young protagonist of this wordless picture book boots a football through time and onto Shakespeare’s stage, sparking an irate bard’s pursuit of him through a gorgeously-drawn Elizabethan London.

The boy quickly finds allies in his flight – rescuing a caged bear and an imprisoned noble. He even lands on the royal barge, in time for a dance with Queen Elizabeth I and courtiers. All’s well that ends well, but re-reading will enable you to spot quirky details in the drawings and put words in the characters’ mouths.

2. Bold and Brave Women from Shakespeare by Anjna Chouhan and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (authors), Becca Stadtlander (illustrator), 2024

The organisation that looks after Shakespeare’s houses in Stratford-upon-Avon has created this picture book anthology, with short sections on separate figures.

While its title has echoes of Mary Cowden Clarke’s 1850 book, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, its content departs from her Victorian moralising. The depiction of characters, from Cleopatra to Lady Macbeth, offers feminist overtones and a range of skin tones.

3. Rock Bottom by Ross Montgomery (author) and Mark Beech (illustrator), 2020

One instalment in a series of four “Shakespeare Shake-ups”, this book for primary schoolers retells the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream using the familiar devices of children staging a school production and plans to impress a crush crashing.

I have laughed out loud reading these books. They tell relatable stories about friendship, awkwardness and teacher-pupil tensions. You might forget the plots are from the plays, they’re so deftly retold, but Shakespeare buffs will enjoy spotting allusions.

4. Much Ado About Nothing by Steve Barlow and Steve Skidmore (adapters), Wendy Tan Shiau Wei (illustrator), 2022

My favourite in a series of six editions of Shakespeare’s plays in graphic novel form. Each has a pithy, modernised text and resources at either end of the book to support readers’ understanding of both the play and the period.

Much Ado also exemplifies the series’ commitment to diversity. Importantly, this gels with the diverse casts students are likely to see in contemporary films and performances of Shakespeare, and reflects the ethnic diversity of school (and national) populations.

5. King of Shadows by Susan Cooper, 1999

From a popular British fantasy writer for children, this novel was significantly inspired by the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London. It’s the most compelling of a slew of Globe-focused theatre adventures published at the turn of the millennium.

A stage-mad American boy, grieving his parents, time-travels to early modern England and is mentored in acting – and surviving loss – by Shakespeare, who mourns his dead son, Hamnet. Plague contagion allows for some top-notch body swapping.

6. Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease, 1940

The original “children-in-disguise go on Shakespeare’s stage” novel – at least for me. It was a class text at the end of primary school. It differs from King of Shadows in opening with travelling players touring the Lake District, although it takes in London’s early modern glitterati later. Real historical figures abound and are delightfully shady, as in biographical Shakespeare fiction generally.

7. The Dark Lady by Akala, 2021

This take on destitute children in Elizabethan London running into a kindly, father-figure Shakespeare has various unique qualities. One is balancing the main plot about Henry, a pickpocket who has the supernatural ability to read any language, with cryptic fragments from “the Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for whom the book is named. Here, she is imagined as the descendent of an African ruling elite.

Akala is a Black British rapper and writer, whose work prominently features Shakespeare – though there are lashings of Charles Dickens’ Oliver here too.

8. Love Disguised by Lisa Klein, 2013

Adolescent Shakespeare opens this novel narrating his Stratford childhood, his father’s business woes, and plans to rescue his family’s fortunes while working in the theatre. In addition to having Shakespeare as the protagonist, this book offers an unusual explanation for his wife Anne Hathaway’s pregnancy before marriage. This is territory well-trodden by scholars, but Klein inventively borrows plotlines from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well in her interpretation.

9. Saving Hamlet by Molly Booth, 2016

In the vein of Hollywood Shakespeare movies, the narrator’s high school is staging Hamlet and it’s going disastrously. The novel mashes up this genre with time-travelling theatre adventure, so that assistant-director Emma moves back and forth at will between two theatre worlds. The ideas she gleans from each benefit the other, so two high-stakes productions of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy are saved.

Theatre-kids will enjoy a writer who really knows her stuff: oft-overlooked tech crews are well-served by details of lighting and sound production. Saving Hamlet features several modern-day lesbian and gay main characters, with contrasting experiences of coming out.

10. Juliet Immortal by Stacey Jay, 2011

I came to this book because of the Twilight saga, and so may young readers with a taste for paranormal romance. It is set among teens staging Romeo and Juliet at their California high school. Narration is split between a modern-day girl, Ariel, and the undead Juliet.

The story deals superbly with consent, relationship violence and toxic masculinity – all elements of the play that literary critics have acknowledged – and also models positive alternatives. For those whose vampiric appetites aren’t sated, there’s an equally-gripping sequel: Romeo Redeemed.

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This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Sarah Olive is a member of the British Shakespeare Association’s Education Committee (a registered charity) and founding editor of the free, online magazine Teaching Shakespeare.

– ref. Shakespeare for children: an expert’s top ten books to spark their imagination – https://theconversation.com/shakespeare-for-children-an-experts-top-ten-books-to-spark-their-imagination-263490

Source: The Conversation – UK – By David Bailey, Professor of Business Economics, University of Birmingham

Car manufacturing at Jaguar Land Rover recently ground to a halt after a “catastrophic” cyber-attack.

Forced to shut down plants in the UK, Slovakia, Brazil, India and China, the disruption comes at a challenging time for the company. It had already postponed the launch of new models after the uptake of electric vehicles stalled. And Donald Trump’s tariffs have been a major cause of concern for the British car industry as a whole.

Profits at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) will undoubtedly take a hit, as they did at M&S and Co-op when they were the victims of cyber-attacks earlier this year.

Normally, JLR makes around 1,000 cars a day, with the average price of a new vehicle around £72,000. That means JLR is missing out on daily sales of some £72 million, and profits of £5 million a day.

The firm has now extended the shutdown to September 24 2025, by which time the loss of revenues will be around £1.7 billion and the hit to profits some £120 million. There are even fears that this could go on until November, and restarting production will be a complex business given the “build to order” nature of premium cars (when vehicles are only manufactured after a customer purchase is confirmed).

But the longer the shutdown goes on, the more likely it is that those customers will simply decide to go elsewhere. For the time being, spare parts can’t be ordered, cars can’t be serviced, and new car sales will stall, in what is usually a particularly busy month.

The firm’s brand image will take a battering too, to add to recent social media derision which has included an attack from Donald Trump and a much maligned brand relaunch last year which centred on the controversial design of its “Type OO” concept car.

There are also livelihoods at stake. The company’s supply chain, centred in the west Midlands region of the UK, supports as many as 200,000 jobs.

The longer the shutdown goes on the bigger the impact on the supply chain. Firms have already sent staff home, while others are running out of money. According to the Unite union, some supply chain workers have been told to apply for state benefits.

Road ahead

For its part, JLR has said that it can survive the shutdown but that its supply chain will need help – a call echoed by the union and some members of parliament.

And the UK government really needs to start thinking about a financial lifeline to keep the supply chain going. That could be in the form of a furlough scheme to keep workers in place or some sort of loan scheme for supply chain firms.

Both were used during COVID and thought to have safeguarded some 4 million jobs.

Emergency support in response to shocks is common in other countries like Germany, and has been used in the UK car manufacturing supply chain before, after the MG Rover closure in 2005, and also after the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami which saw the interrupted flow of key components from Japan shut down production at Honda.

That support came via the regional development agency Advantage West Midlands (in the case of MG Rover) and later the Manufacturing Advisory Service (after the Japanese earthquake).

Both agencies have since been scrapped, underscoring the lack of any “place-based” or region-specific industrial policy capacity in England. That really needs to change.

The Department for Business and Trade and its new secretary of state Peter Kyle need to be doing more than just monitoring the situation. It needs to start thinking about how emergency support could be provided to the supply chain. A huge number of jobs depend on JLR getting up and running again – and quickly.

David Bailey receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council through the UK in a Changing Europe Programme.

– ref. Cyber-attackers slammed the brakes on Jaguar Land Rover’s manufacturing – here’s why the UK government should step in – https://theconversation.com/cyber-attackers-slammed-the-brakes-on-jaguar-land-rovers-manufacturing-heres-why-the-uk-government-should-step-in-265126