BLOODY TEENAGERS

Lucy Cuthew worked in children’s publishing before becoming an author. She has written more than thirty children’s books. Her first YA novel, Blood Moon, tackles periods, sex and online shaming – in verse.

How did you come up with the idea for the story?

The first thing I had when I started was the voice of the main character. I could hear the particular rhythm of her speech, and I just started writing from there. I’d recently read , by Jon Ronson and I was doing a lot of research into shame, because I wanted to write about it. I was also thinking about the relative absence of menstruation in