At just 18, she made headlines after bagging a six-figure deal for her first book, Solitaire, which tells the story of 16-year-old Tori Spring, a sardonic introvert who is reluctantly persuaded by her new friend Michael to help discover the identity of a hacker who is disrupting the school computer network. She may put it down to luck, but there is a quiet determination in the way the writer talks about her work. I feel really lucky and grateful to be in this position.” “Very few creators achieve this level of success, and I’m very aware of that. Oseman, who is also the author of four prose novels for young adults, knows her experience in the publishing world has been a rare one.

Volume One recently won the Books Are My Bag readers’ choice award and is a contender for the 2022 Waterstones book of the year. The show’s success resulted in a huge increase in book sales for Oseman: the Heartstopper series has now sold more than 6m copies worldwide. It’s not hard to see why the TV adaptation won over teenagers and adults alike, with its lovable characters, quirky nods to its comic book origins – for example, tiny animations of hand-drawn flowers form a circle round the actors when Nick and Charlie share their first kiss – and an injection of starriness in the shape of Olivia Colman (Nick’s mum) and Stephen Fry (headmaster Barnes). The boy-meets-boy tale, set in a British secondary school, sees rugby captain Nick and socially awkward Charlie navigate friendships, bullying, coming out – and falling in love. The series in question is of course Heartstopper, the web comic turned graphic novel turned Netflix show that this paper’s reviewer described as “completely lovely” when it aired earlier this year. But instead of giving up Netflix so she could save for a deposit, as Kirstie Allsopp notoriously recommended, she sold the streaming service the rights to her gay romance comic book series.

A t 28, the author and illustrator Alice Oseman recently achieved what so many of her peers cannot: she bought a flat.

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