The shortlist for the 2015 Inky Awards was announced late last month, so if you are aged between 12 and 20, get in there and place your vote!

The shortlist for 2015 is as follows:

Gold Inky Award shortlist:

The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl by Melissa Keil (Hardie Grant Egmont)
Razorhurst by Justine Larbalestier (Allen & Unwin)
Laurinda by Alice Pung (Black Inc)
The Intern by Gabrielle Tozer (HarperCollins Publishers)
The Protected by Claire Zorn (University of Queensland Press)

Silver Inky Award shortlist:

Bird by Crystal Chan (Text Publishing)
Spark by Rachael Craw (Walker Books)
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart (Allen & Unwin)
Since You’ve Been Gone by Morgan Matson (Simon & Schuster)
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (PanMacmillan)

Congratulations to all who made the list. We’ll be tuning in on Tuesday the 13th of October to see which books are named as the Gold and Silver Inky Winners in 2015.

For more information, visit https://insideadog.com.au/vote

Last week we made a big to-do of the CBCA Book of the Year awards, but now it is time to re-direct the spotlight to another superstar who was  honored on the day, illustrator Michael Camilleri.

The Crichton Award for New Illustrators was awarded to Michael for his extraordinary work on the picture book, One Minute’s Silence, written by David Metzenthen.

One Minute’s Silence is a book about Gallipoli and Remembrance unlike any other. Readers are invited to imagine soldiers’ experiences from both sides of a conflict, to empathize with defenders and invaders in turn. This is bought to life by Michael’s illustrations which use an array of techniques and ideas, from comics, maps, technical illustrations and the use of contemporary year 12 students in place of both turks and diggers.

Please see Michael in action at a school below – thanks to Ange Ritchie for allowing us to share her fantastic photos.

(And don’t worry, Michael isn’t angry, he is just showing his ‘disgust’ face whilst discussing facial expressions)

If you would like to find out more about Michael, and his session on One Minute’s Silence, please click here

What a great beginning to Book Week 2015. We are so thrilled to celebrate the fantastic books that have been honored today in the 2015 CBCA awards!

We would like to make special mention of the joint-winner of three of the categories, Freya Blackwood, whose illustrations will light up any young readers world.

Here is the full list of winning and honour books:

Older Readers
Winner
The Protected Claire Zorn
Honour Books
Nona & Me Clare Atkins
The Minnow Diana Sweeney

Younger Readers
Winner
The Cleo Stories: The Necklace and the Present Libby Gleenson, Ill. Freya Blackwood
Honour Books
Two Wolves Tristan Bancks
Withering-by-Sea: a Stella Montgomery Intrigue Judith Rossell

Early Childhood
Winner
Go to Sleep, Jessie! Libby Gleenson, Ill. Freya Blackwood
Honour Books
Scary Night Lesley Gibbes, Ill. Stephen Michael King
Noni the Pony goes to the Beach Alison Lester

Picture Book
Winner
My two Blankets Irena Kobald and Freya Blackwood
Honour Books
One Minute’s Silence Michael Camilleri and David Metzenthen
The Stone Lion Ritva Voutila and Margaret Wild

Eve Pownall Award for Information Books
Winner
A-Z of Convicts in Van Diemen’s Land Simon Barnard
Honour Books
Tea and Sugar Christmas Jane Jolly, Ill. Robert Ingpen
Audacity: Stories of Heroic Australians in Wartime Charlie Walker

We extend our best wishes and congratulations to all of the authors, illustrators and publishers behind these books, and all the books that made it to the 2015 shortlist.

To view the full list of nominees visit the CBCA website.

After seeing more than 70 of his books published, Michael Wagner has now launched his own micro-publishing company Billy Goat Books. 

The first title to be released with Billy Goat Books is Michael’s latest work, Pig Dude: He can do ANYTHING!

Releasing in late August 2015, this hair-raising and heart-warming adventure has a little bit of everything, for everyone. The young (and young at heart) will be delighted by Pig Dude’s attempts to fly, by almost any means – often resulting in a bruised ego and a bare bottom along the way…

For more information about Billy Goat Books and Pig Dude: He can do ANYTHING! please visit www.billygoatbooks.com

We are thrilled to extend our congratulations to Trace Balla and Wendy Orr, who were both honored at the 2015 Environment Award for Children’s Literature last week.

Trace Balla’s hit book Rivertime took out the Picture Fiction award.

Wendy Orr’s book Rescue on Nim’s Island was award the Fiction prize.

The joint winners of the Non-Fiction category were Emu (Claire Saxby and Graham Byrne) and Our Class Tiger (Aleesah Darlison and Antonia Stylianou).

The Environment Award for Children’s Literature is an initiative of The Wilderness Society.

Pictured from top to bottom: Trace Balla, Wendy Orr and Morris Gleitzman welcoming the audience.

We are delighted to share some exciting news for Chrissie Perry! Following on from a display at the Bologna Book Fair, Simon and Shuster in the USA have acquired her ‘Penelope Perfect’ series.

Anticipated publishing dates for the first two books in the series, Project Best Friend and Very Private List for Camp Success is set for Summer 2016.

Pictured is Very Private List for Camp Success which was released by Hardie Grant Egmont in Australia yesterday.

Congratulations Sofie Laguna! Last night Sofie was named as the Winner of the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her second novel, The Eye of the Sheep.

The Miles Franklin is Australia’s most prestigious literary award and was established by Stella Miles Franklin, the author of My Brilliant Career. The first Miles Franklin was first awarded in 1957 and has been awarded annually to novels of the highest literary merit and presentation of Australian life ever since.

Sofie is an author, actor and playwright. Her books for young people have been named Honour Books and Notable Books in the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards and have been shortlisted in the Queensland Premier’s Awards.

Sofie’s first novel One Foot Wrong was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. After The Eye of the Sheep was awarded the Miles Franklin Award, Richard Neville, on behalf of the judging panel provided these notes:

….the power of this finely crafted novel lies in its raw, high-energy, coruscating language which is the world of young Jimmy Flick, who sees everything. But his manic x-ray perceptions don’t correspond with the way others see his world. His older brother understands him some of the time, and his mother almost all of the time, but other people, including his violent father, just see him as difficult. Weathering successive waves of domestic violence, Jimmy navigates his way through the shoals of alcohol-abuse, illness and tragedy that swamp his parents, and ultimately reaches the possibility of equanimity. The Eye of the Sheep is an extraordinary novel about love and anger, and how sometimes there is little between them.

Congratulations Sofie!

For more information about The Eye of the Sheep please visit Allen and Unwin: https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/fiction/literary-fiction/The-Eye-of-the-Sheep-Sofie-Laguna-9781743319598

For more information about the Miles Franklin Literary Award, please visit http://www.milesfranklin.com.au/newhome

The 2015 Reading Matters Conference was a celebration of young adult literature for teenagers and the young at heart. Author and poet Abe Nouk started the conference with a poem titled The Inheritors of Language. “The voices of your ancestors are in your vocal cords,” he said, kicking off a conference that focused on the significance of diversity in literature. American author Laurie Halse Anderson’s presentation was fierce, courageous and honest. “I write resilience literature,” she said, and spoke about her tough teenage years, keeping her stories real as a writer and stories being vessels that passed on “wisdom from one generation to the next.” Sally Gardner learned to read at fourteen and talked about her struggles with dyslexia with honesty and heart. “We are stuck with a desperate way of writing off children,” she said and spoke of the importance of giving children and teenagers their childhoods back.

– thanks to Demet Divaroren for this report. Demet is the co-editor of CBCA nominated Coming of Age: Growing up Muslim in Australia.

Another highlight of the conference was the ‘Hashtag Teen’ panel, which looked at engaging teenagers in literature via digital spaces and online campaigns. Fanfiction and digital storytelling initiatives Archive of Our Own (AO3), the SLV’s Shift Alt Story online course and Penguin Teen Australia’s PTAChat Twitter hashtag were all bought up as examples of great forums for teenagers to engage in writing online. Amie Kaufman also spoke about the popularity of ‘booktubing’, which has a wide reach with younger readers, citing YouTube blogger Little Book Owl who has 120,000 subscribers.

– information taken from www.booksellerandpublisher.com.au

We are delighted to declare the recent tour from Ursula Dubosarsky and Andrew Joyner a great success!

In the Booked Out office we were delighted to meet this excellent pair, who bought elephants, koalas and more into schools across Melbourne last week. We were especially  delighted to receive some excellent feedback from Sue Austin in the library at Heathmont East Primary School. Here is what Sue had to say:

The presentation was incredible. Both Ursula and Andrew were very engaged with the audience which ranged from Prep to Grade 6. They were educational and entertaining and I would highly recommend them for any school looking for presenters for a very special literary event. Ursula spoke about the creative process in relation to writing and collaboration and Andrew, with input from the audience, created a very special story book for the school, showing the students how he could create a character from basic shapes.  
 
Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to meet such inspirational people!

Sue has also shared the great picture to the right!

Also below is a wonderful story created by Ursula, Andrew and the grade 3/4 students of St Anne’s School:

For some great action shots, also check out St Anne’s School online – link HERE

We are so pleased to that the tour was such a great success – thank you to all the schools who hosted Ursula and Andrew, and of course to this wonderful author/illustrator team.

We look forward to seeing them, along with elephants and koalas galore,  back in Victoria again soon!

Having recently completed a week-long residency at Melbourne Girls’ College, I’m reminded once again that poetry is still a vibrant and incredibly relevant art form (if anyone ever doubted it). Students were air-punching over metaphors. Candles were blown out in place of punctuation marks. Not a literary leaf was left unturned as we began our autumnal foray into the very heart of language.

During my time at MGC – where I was made to feel very welcome – I took each of the Year 8 classes through two workshops. The intended outcome – apart from giving ourselves up to the thrills and spills of poetry – was to produce, in small groups, a list poem that would be performed in front of the class at the end of the second session. But as I told them, ‘writing is a blood-sport’, so this would be no shy affair, the best group to be selected to go forward to perform in front of staff and students in a final competition (the winner of that event to go on to compete in Melbourne Writers’ Festival Poetry Slam.)

First, we began with some warm-ups to make sure no one pulled any poetic muscles and that everyone was clear on one thing – I allow plenty of space for creativity but none whatsoever for clichés! By the end of the warm-ups, we already had an idea who were the ones to watch in the room and just how high the standard was going to be. I then introduced them to the idea of the list poem via one of the finest examples of its type – Wallace Steven’s extraordinary ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. With a literary giant leading the way, we began our own poems, and over the rest of the first session and most of the second, students wrote alone then in groups, perfecting and practicing till they had their final piece. Topics ranged from adoption to moonshadow to a bullet – all chosen by the students and explored in ways that ranged from the concrete to the abstract, the philosophical to the enticingly strange. And every effort was made during the workshops to ensure that the wonderful teachers at MGC were also learning new ways of working with poetry, just as I was learning from the ways they coaxed the best out of their students, whether it was on the level of performance or content. A win-win you could say!

The following week I went back in to judge the final – a perilous task indeed. I’d fallen in love with so many lines and images I’d heard during the workshops that I knew it would be almost impossible to pick a winner. There were guitars played, flowers tossed, dramatic hand gestures and creative use of voice repetition to rival the most stirring moves in synchronised swimming. Alas, in the end, I had to make a choice. ‘Clouds have the power – they decide the fate of the day’ stood above what was a very impressive selection of poems, so impressive that it was hard to believe they had been produced in the space of a week (even a title like that would take most poets months to perfect!)

But in the end, poetry was the true winner. It claimed its space. Broke hearts. Convinced even the doubtful that it is a force to be reckoned with. My thanks to Melbourne Girls’ College for giving me (and poetry) the freedom we needed to allow for something worthwhile and artistically-satisfying to take place. It was an absolute pleasure. I can’t wait to go back!

– Lia Hills, April 2015