Tristan Bancks

I wanted to say thank you for your assistance in organising our guest speaker session with Tristan Bancks at Mount Beauty Secondary College. His session was brilliant – all teaching staff and Year 7 students involved were very thankful and really found his session extremely worthwhile. Tristan relates in such an engaging and energetic manner with the students due to his relatable nature with adolescents, his array of visuals and movie clips, along with his experiences as a published author and animator/movie maker. I had many Year 7 students tell me how impressed they were, and how much better the session was compared to their expectations. It was certainly inspiring for them, and the English teaching staff involved with the session found Tristan’s authorial experiences really worthwhile in discovering other creative writing activities and strategies.

(Skype Session) – Our Yr 5 & 6 students responded very well to Tristan’s session. He was funny, engaging and aimed his talk at the appropriate level. When our session was interrupted by an internet outage, he kindly offered to make up the time by answering student questions on a little video. That was much appreciated and the kids loved it. There was a rush to borrow the books he recommended. A great speaker and I highly recommend Tristan to inspire disengaged boys.

Tristan’s Year 8 audience found him informative and engaging. Students particularly enjoyed his animated readings of passages from his books and learning about the writing process from initial ideas to publication.

Tristan was fantastic! I had tonnes of comments from staff and kids saying how engaging and funny he was. The amount of kids who literally sprinted to the library afterwards to demand copies of his books was staggering.

I thought Tristan was fantastic.

If I was a kid I would want to read all of his books. He really appealed to kids in a contemporary manner, talking about electronic devices and how he uses them to help his writing.

I thought that his idea of writing and taking pictures outdoors to develop character and setting could be easily transferred to the our writing lessons.

Tristan is really cool with the kids – they identify with him immediately, in his jeans and sneakers and T-shirt, and familiar use of technology. Personally, I think the day was not about selling books but more about enthusing kids to take an interest in reading and writing. He did just that!

Tristan was very good and we received excellent feedback from the students and staff.

Thank you so much for recommending Tristan Bancks for our author visit, this year. He quickly established a rapport with the students and seems to have achieved rock star status at Penleigh and Essendon Grammar school, within a very short time!
Immediately after his visit, many boys purchased his books online, multiple reservations were placed on all his books (that hadn’t been processed yet!), and students are still requesting that we read his books and access his website.
Aside from motivating the boys to read, he has incited them to want to write. One class has since implemented an ‘anything goes book’-to jot story ideas throughout the day and many boys have downloaded his storybook app.

We were genuinely impressed by his passion for children’s literature and his accessibility to the students. One student summed it up perfectly when he said, ‘Tristan inspires me.’

We are here to thank you for your amazing presentation when you  came to MSJ. Your words have inspired many of us, in understanding the topics we’ve been exploring. While we have been reading your book, and the background information you shared has provided us with a much deeper understanding of the story and its meaning.

So we thank you deeply for your work.