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

The CBCA shortlist is announced!

Congratulations to all authors who have made it to the shortlist — check it out here.

We are especially delighted to congratulate the following authors, editors and illustrators who are good pals of ours:

Melissa Keil – ‘The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl’
Tristan Bancks – ‘Two Wolves’
Freya Blackwood – ‘The Cleo Stories: The Necklace and the Present’, ‘Go to Sleep Jessie!’ AND ‘My Two Blankets’
Trace Balla – ‘Rivertime’
Michael Camilleri – ‘One Minute’s Silence’
Glenda Millard – ‘The Duck and the Darklings’
Jackie French – ‘Fire’
Demet Divaroren & Amra Pajalic – ‘Coming of Age: Growing up Muslim in Australia’

It’s always an impossible task to pick a book cover to feature. We had to go with a cover by Freya Blackwood since she managed to illustrate three of the books on this year’s shortlist! Wow, go Freya!

We look forward to hearing which books win the top prizes in August!

We are delighted to share an excellent article about the launch of Prue Mason’s latest book Zafir which appeared in The Age on the 23rd of March and can be read HERE

Prue Mason‘s book Zafir is the last in the six-book Through My Eyes series and tells the story of a 13-year-old Zafir. The year is 2011 and the setting is the Syrian city of Homs. Zafir and his family are caught up in the early days of  the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that we now know resulted in mass killings.

The Through My Eyes series is aimed at students aged 11-14 and each book is set in a different area of conflict – the titles are all written by Australian authors and the full set of titles include Shahana, Emilio, Amina, Malini, Naveed and of course, Zafir.

The series editor is Lyn White, and Lyn along with the authors are available to speak about their books and the Through My Eyes series.

Last night Andrew McDonald and Chris Miles delighted a packed room of teachers at Readings, Hawthorn. They discussed how they both use humour to talk about difficult and awkward themes. Andrew’s novel Son of Death is a funny and smart way of talking about death, and Chris’s book Spurt: A balls and All Story offers a hilarious take on going through puberty. Andrew and Chris interviewed each other about their books and how they have both used humour to get these challenging issues out in the open.

After intermission, Fiona Wood and Gabrielle Williams took up the discussion for secondary teachers and spoke together about teenage resilience. Speaking from personal experiences, Fiona and Gabrielle highlighted how teenagers need to have resilience to deal with having spots, through to parents and problematic relationships.

Teachers appreciated hearing from these interesting authors and left after buying vast quantities of books!

Next Tuesday, 24th of March, we are excited to announce that our lovely friends at Readings bookshop are holding a teachers’ night at their Hawthorn shop. This is a great chance to hear Booked Out authors Fiona Wood, Gabrielle Williams, Andrew McDonald and Chris Miles.

It’s a great opportunity to see these speakers talk about their new books;  we think they’re fantastic, and all four live in Melbourne, and love to visit schools for talks, workshops and residencies. Think of it as a degustation menu for who you might book to inspire your students this year!

Not only is this evening free, but Readings will also offer you a 20% discount on books purchased on the night, and there will be Readings children’s and YA specialists there to chat with you about the Readings Children’s Book Prize shortlist, and recent and upcoming reads.

The evening is split into two sessions: primary and secondary, and you’re welcome to come for one session or both. As mentioned, it is free, but please RSVP through the Readings event page: primary and secondary.

Click HERE to view the event PDF for further information.

Attention all Emerging Writers! The Monash University Undergraduate Prize for Creative Writing is now open for entries!

They are looking for creative writing in all forms, from short stories to narrative non-fiction, narrative verse and beyond. The only condition –  you’ve got to be an undergraduate or honours student in Australia or New Zealand.

Along with the $5000 prize money up for grabs, every writer who gets shortlisted will receive VIP tickets to the Emerging Writers’ Festival Opening Night Gala – a great chance to meet and greet other emerging writers and industry professionals.

For further information, visit the Emerging Writers’ Festival website.

Entries close at 5pm, 17 April 2015.