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| Laura Steven - a Novelist Whyilovethisbook, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
Laura Steven is a writer who has quietly but decisively made a mark on contemporary English fiction.
Emerging from a background in journalism and creative writing, she has forged a career that spans crime thrillers, sharp young-adult novels, middle-grade fantasy, and literary experiments that play with genre and form.
Her work blends biting humour, emotional intelligence, and a persistent interest in how women—especially young women—negotiate power, reputation, and identity.
This longform essay maps Steven’s literary style and formal experiments, gives detailed readings of at least five of her novels, and summarizes the prizes and recognition that have accompanied her career. The piece is written to be SEO-friendly (target phrases such as “Laura Steven novelist,” “Laura Steven books,” “The Exact Opposite of Okay synopsis,” “Laura Steven awards,” and “young adult novels by Laura Steven”) while remaining a readable, publish-ready essay.
From journalism to fiction: a quick portrait
Laura Steven grew up in the far north of England and trained in journalism before moving into fiction. Early in her career she published under pen names and explored crime fiction before rebranding herself and emerging as a distinctive voice in young-adult and middle-grade fiction. Across those shifts she has retained two consistent talents: a journalist’s eye for detail and a comic sensibility that allows her to examine heavy topics—sexual reputation, body image, social cruelty, and moral ambiguity—through surprising and often subversive humour. These roots in reportage combine with a formal restlessness that pushes her toward hybrid projects: trilogy plans, duologies, retellings, and playful rewritings of canonical texts.
Literary style: humour, moral pressure, and character under stress
One thread that runs through Steven’s work is the conviction that “action is character.” Her protagonists are revealed by what they do under pressure—their choices, their evasions, and the private coping mechanisms they develop when public life becomes hostile.
Steven’s prose tends toward clarity and immediacy: she uses brisk sentences and energetic voice to keep reader attention focused on interior shifts rather than rhetorical flourish. The humour in her novels is not mere levity; it operates as a coping strategy for characters who face shame, surveillance, or structural injustice. That humour can be caustic, self-protective, or darkly comic, but it always serves to humanize rather than to distance.
Formally, Steven is an experimenter who nevertheless respects readability. She moves between formats—epistolary fragments, diary-adjacent blogging voices, dual timelines—when the material calls for it, and she is unafraid to retell or invert classics to probe contemporary anxieties (for example, using dark academia or gothic tropes to explore body image and beauty standards). This willingness to shift genre is not gratuitous; it arises from a core question in her work: how do narrative structures shape identity, and how can form itself mirror social pressures?
The Exact Opposite of Okay (2018): reputation, sex, and comedic moral gravity
Steven’s breakthrough to a wider audience came with The Exact Opposite of Okay, the first in her Izzy O’Neill duology. The novel centers on Izzy, a sharp, funny, sex-positive teenager who suddenly finds intimate pictures of herself circulating in a public and humiliating way. The book is as much about the social mechanics of shame—how gossip spreads, who profits from shaming, and how institutions fail young people—as it is about Izzy’s attempts to reclaim narrative agency.
Steven deploys comedy and first-person immediacy to spectacular effect. Izzy’s voice crackles with defiance, sarcasm, and grief; her jokes are both armour and indictment. The novel’s structure—alternating between public fallout and private introspection—allows Steven to show how quickly a life can be reframed by viral exposure and how complicated the path to self-recovery becomes when trust has been shattered.
The book won notable recognition: it was awarded an inaugural prize that celebrated comedic writing by women and established Steven early on as a writer who could blend humour with serious social critique. The novel’s success also launched Steven’s profile in YA publishing and set the tone for her subsequent explorations of how reputation and gender intersect in a mediated world.
A Girl Called Shameless (2019): sequel, continuity, and escalation
The sequel A Girl Called Shameless continues Izzy O’Neill’s story, tracking the long tail of public scandal and the way survivors negotiate life after a fall from social grace. Where the first novel focused tightly on the immediate crisis and its emotional fallout, the second widens the lens: it follows the social repercussions, complexities of friendship, and the stubborn persistence of institutional double standards.
Here Steven deepens her portrait of community—family, school, and social media ecosystems—and interrogates the slow mechanisms by which people are labelled, penalized, or rehabilitated. The sequel functions both as character development for Izzy and as an extended social essay about empathy, accountability, and the hard work of repair. Stylistically, the book repeats the formal energy of the first while introducing new tonal inflections—moments of lyric tenderness that balance the novel’s sharper satirical edges.
The Love Hypothesis (2020): YA reach and screen interest
Steven’s The Love Hypothesis demonstrated her ability to create commercially appealing but thematically substantive YA fiction. Combining star-driven romance tropes with the moral complications of contemporary youth (including questions about consent, ambition, and public personhood), the novel found cross-market appeal. It was notable not only for readership success but also because a production company optioned the television rights—an indicator that Steven’s plotting and characters have vivid screen potential.
What stands out in this novel is Steven’s skill at pacing and her knack for emotional beats: she balances romantic expectation with structural critique, pushing readers to ask whose stories are allowed to be love stories and what compromises the characters accept to make themselves legible to their communities. The television option, announced ahead of the book’s release, underscored the adaptability of Steven’s narratives—her ear for dialogue, her sense of scene, and her ability to construct set-piece moments that translate well to visual media.
The Society for Soulless Girls (2022): horror, duality, and Gothic retelling
In The Society for Soulless Girls, Steven turned to a darker, more allegorical mode. The novel riffs on classic duality narratives, using gothic and horror tropes to probe the costs of conforming to beauty norms and social expectations. Framed as a retelling of a familiar canonical text about split selves, the book refracts questions about female rage, performative femininity, and the commodification of appearance.
Formally, it’s one of Steven’s most daring projects: she embraces mood, atmosphere, and symbolic doubling rather than relying wholly on plot. The result is a novel that reads like a social fable—sharp in its satirical diagnosis, tender in its sympathy for the protagonists. This is a writer experimenting with genre to get at contemporary psychic truth: how external pressure to look a certain way warps interior life and fractures identity.
Every Exquisite Thing (2023): dark academia, image politics, and retelling
With Every Exquisite Thing, Laura Steven once again engaged in a literary retelling—this time drawing elements from a famed late-19th-century novel and reimagining them within a sapphic dark-academia frame. The book interrogates the toxic relationship between beauty and power, asking why young people, especially girls, internalize harmful standards and what it costs to pursue aesthetic perfection.
The novel’s atmosphere is exquisitely rendered: cloistered academic settings, enigmatic art objects, and rituals of initiation serve as both literal backdrops and metaphors for the corrosive pursuit of external validation. Steven’s use of dark academia is not nostalgic but diagnostic; she uses the genre’s romantic trappings to lay bare the anxieties of female adolescence. The novel was shortlisted for a major YA literary prize in 2024—evidence that Steven’s experiments with gothic and academic modes have resonated with critics as well as readers.
Earlier work and genre range: crime, middle-grade fantasy, and pen names
Before her YA breakthrough, Steven published crime thrillers under a different name; those early novels demonstrated her gift for plotting and the lean narrative mechanics that would later inform her YA trips. She also writes middle-grade fantasy under a different pen name, producing two whimsical titles about mermaids that show a lighter, more playful register in her output. That breadth—from tense crime to tender middle-grade fantasies to dark YA fables—speaks to a writer who refuses to be boxed in. Her career trajectory is a study in reinvention: adopting pseudonyms, switching imprints, and shifting genres when a fresh narrative approach is required.
Recurring themes and ethical commitments
Across her catalog, several recurring themes surface:
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Shame and public surveillance. Steven is fascinated by how reputation is formed and destroyed—how gossip, media, and institutions participate in shaming, and how survivors navigate recovery.
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Female rage and solidarity. Rather than presenting women as mere victims, her novels often explore anger as an intelligible response and as potential fuel for transformation.
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Body politics and beauty standards. Multiple works interrogate the cultural economy of appearance, mapping how power operates through aesthetics.
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Identity as performance. Many of her protagonists perform identities to survive or to gain agency; Steven probes the ethical costs of those performances.
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Form as diagnostic tool. When Steven adopts vampiric, gothic, or dark-academy modes, she does so to reveal the psychological realities of her characters—form as method, not decoration.
These thematic commitments make her work feel urgent: she writes not merely to entertain but to stage social diagnosis through the intimacy of narrative. Her characters are often young women at critical hinge points, and by making those hinge moments legible, Steven invites readers into ethical reflection rather than mere voyeurism.
Prizes, honours, and industry recognition
Laura Steven’s work has been recognized with a mix of awards and shortlistings. Her early YA success earned her a prize celebrating comedy by women writers, establishing her as a voice who could fuse humour with critique. She was later shortlisted for the YA Book Prize for a later novel, a sign that both her craft and thematic reach continue to win professional acknowledgement.
Her books have attracted optioning interest from television producers, and she has been shortlisted for industry prizes that recognise achievement in young-adult literature. These honours—prizes, shortlistings, and screen options—have helped to broaden the audience for her work and to confirm her as a writer with both critical and commercial traction.
Why Laura Steven matters: a final assessment
Laura Steven matters because she combines several rare gifts: comic timing with ethical seriousness, formal daring with mass appeal, and an ear for young voices alongside a judgment about what to withhold and what to expose. She is emblematic of a new generation of English novelists who refuse to be genre-bound: crime novels give way to YA, YA to dark reworkings of classics, and middle-grade fantasies coexist with hard social satire.
Her career also models smart professional reinvention. Using pseudonyms when useful, shifting imprints, and welcoming adaptation interest are all moves that show a modern writer’s savvy in a crowded marketplace. More importantly, her material—about how power, image, and shame shape young lives—has proven durable and resonant across formats.
For readers seeking novels that combine entertainment and moral complexity, Laura Steven offers a catalog that is funny, unsettling, and humane. For writers and critics, her work is a case study in how genre can be bent to ethical ends: horror to expose vanity, comedy to expose cruelty, romance to expose transactional love, and crime to expose institutional failures. She is a novelist whose experiments are always in service of a moral imagination, and that is the measure of her achievement.
