Solving crimes, telling stories: An interview with Tom Ryan

Like the interviewer, Tom Ryan is based in Nova Scotia, in Canada’s Maritimes. Ryan is the author of more than a half-dozen books, including some critically acclaimed works for young readers: Keep This to Yourself (2019), for example, earned the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for YA Crime Book and the 2020 ITW Award for Best YA Thriller; more recently I Hope You’re Listening (2020) was awarded the 2021 Lambda Literary Award. In what follows, Ryan and I dwell on these two novels to explore what attracts him to the YA genre, his writing process, central themes in his oeuvre and how he imbues his characters with psychological complexity. This interview contributes to scholarship by expanding critical attention on Nova Scotian literature and by attending to Ryan’s remarkably successful works of genre fiction.