CBCA Book of the Year Award Winners 2015

It's always an exciting day for Australian Books- the annual announcement of the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards.

This year has been an absolutely huge year for women writers and illustrators at the CBCA Awards. Freya Blackwood alone won 3 categories! Which is unprecedented in the 70 year history of the awards. And Libby Gleeson won 2! Great stuff. Tonight Libby Gleeson was named as the winner of the 2015 Nan Chauncy Award for an outstanding contribution to Australian Children's Literature.

See the Judges' Report 2015.


Book of the Year Older Readers Winner -

The Protected - Claire Zorn (see my review)

Book of the Year Older Readers Honour Books

Nona & Me - Claire Atkins
The Minnow - Diana Sweeney


Book of the Year Younger Readers Winner -

Libby Gleeson and Freya Blackwood The Cleo Stories: The Necklace and The Present

Book of the Year Younger Readers Honour Books

Two Wolves - Tristan Bancks (see my review)
Withering-By-Sea: A Stella Montgomery Intrigue - Judith Rossell (see my review)

Book of the Year Early Childhood Winner -

Go to Sleep, Jessie! Libby Gleeson, Freya Blackwood

Early Childhood Honour Books

Noni the Pony Goes to the Beach - Alison Lester
Scary Night - Lesley Gibbs, Stephen Michael King (illustrator)


Book of the Year Picture Book Winner -

My Two Blankets - Freya Blackwood, Irena Kobald (text) (see my review)

Book of the Year Picture Book Honour Books

One Minute's Silence - Michael Camilleri, David Metzenthen (text) (see my review)
The Stone Lion - Ritva Voutila, Margaret Wild (text) (see my review)


Eve Pownall Award for Information Books Winner -

A-Z of Convicts in Van Diemen's Land - Simon Barnard

Eve Pownall Award for Information Books Honour Books

Audacity: Stories of Heroic Australians in Wartime - Carlie Walker
Tea and Sugar Christmas - Jane Jolly, Robert Ingpen


Crichton Award for New Illustrators Winner-

One Minute's Silence - Michael Camilleri, David Metzenthen (text) (see my review)

Congratulations to all the winners. There are always more excellent books waiting to be read. 

Last year I managed to pick 50% of the winners by cover work alone. This year I only managed 16%!  Yes I picked one correctly of the 6 categories.

Check out the full Shortlist from April. 

The Stone Lion

Margaret Wild features in the CBCA Award lists each and every year it seems. She is rather prolific, having written over 70 books, and is one of Australia's best writers for young people. I've read quite a few of her books and shared some of them here. The Dream of the Thylacine. The Treasure Box. Tanglewood. This years nominated book is The Stone Lion, illustrated by Ritva Voutila who is a new name to me, although she is an accomplished illustrator and artist who has been illustrating children's books for over 20 years. Ritva has two books included in the Picture Book of the Year Award this year- The Stone Lion which was shortlisted, and Outside by Libby Hathorn which is an Honour Book.

The Stone Lion is a beautiful picture book. A story of sadness and joy, despair and hope. The stone lion sits atop a pedestal outside a library. He longs to be alive so he can stroll through the city streets and run through the park opposite his library.

One snowy night, a small homeless girl Sara brings her baby brother to the lion. Sara is freezing and giving up hope.

Sara and the baby will become cold and hard, he thought, unable to walk or jump or feel, Just like me. 

The lion wants to protect Sara and the baby, to take them into the warm library.

Ritva Voutila has created beautiful warm pastel illustrations that have a European feel with stone lions, snowy nights and robins. I expected to see an Eiffel Tower on each page. The illustrations have a Depression-era feel to them.

Gorgeous Endpapers

The winners of the 2015 Children's Book Council of Australia Awards will be announced tomorrow.

http://australianwomenwriters.com

The Treasure Box

The Treasure Box is another collaboration between two big names in Australian children's books- author Margaret Wild, and illustrator Freya Blackwood. Both are prolific, and usually feature in many awards.  I've featured a few Margaret Wild titles before- The Dream of the Thylacine and Tanglewood.

I'm always rather astonished at the breadth and depth of topics covered in picture books for children. The Treasure Box, like so many others, deals with war. In a nameless war, "the enemy" bomb Peter's city, and everything including the books in the library burns.

Only one book survives. A special book, treasure by Peter's father, "a book about our people, about us".

Peter and his father are ordered out of their home by this faceless enemy, so they join others fleeing their city. They take the precious book with them.

The Treasure Box raises issues of war, death, refugees and oppression. It also deals with hope, perserverence and the power of the human spirit. Just your average picture book stuff.

I always love Freya Blackwood's illustrative style. Her book with Ireland's Roddy Doyle, Her Mother's Face, is one of my favourite picture books ever. Her style is quite distinctive, but she really mixed things up here, and adopted a different approach. She still does her beautiful, soft, emotive drawings but has combined them with texture and layering which give the images even more impact for this war time setting. Freya wrote about the process on her blog back in 2012 when she was working on it.

The stunning endpapers are made from foreign language editions of Sonya Hartnett's The Silver Donkey, and Morris Gleitzman's Once and Then- all books with an obvious wartime theme.

The Treasure Box is shortlisted for the 2014 CBCA Picture Book of the Year (winner to be announced August 15 2014).

http://australianwomenwriters.com

Tanglewood

Tanglewood is the most recent book from the rather extraordinary Margaret Wild. I've featured her previously with her last book, The Dream of the Thylacine. I wasn't as familiar with Vivienne Goodman at first glance, but I see now that she illustrated Mem Fox's Guess What?

Tanglewood is a tree, living a rather lonely life "on a tiny island, in the middle of nowhere". Tanglewood is looking for company, and tries to entice seals, dolphins and birds to visit the island. 

But nobody ever came. 

Until a seagull is blown off course in a storm and lands on the island with Tanglewood, and Tanglewood learns about friendship, family and hope. 

Vivienne Goodman has done a beautiful job illustrating Tanglewood's loneliness. 

Tanglewood is doing quite well this year. It was shortlisted for the Picture Book of the Year 2013 by the Children's Book Council of Australia, along with Sophie Scott Goes South, A Day to Remember and The Coat (which took out the award). Tanglewood won the Environment Award for Children's Literature 2013.

The Dream of the Thylacine

Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks are both famous in their own right. Margaret Wild as the author of more than 70 books, including the extraordinary Fox, the result of her previous pairing with Ron Brooks. Ron, equally is one of our most famous and celebrated illustrators, his Bunyip of Berkeley Creek an enduring Australian classic. So I was sure that any new book by the two of them would be an interesting read.

I have a soft spot too for books about Thylacines, the Tasmanian Tiger, that became extinct in the 1930s after the last known animal died in captivity in Beaumaris Zoo, near Hobart, in 1936. Their extinction is particularly tragic I think, although of course the extinction of any species is tragic. Thylacines lived on the Australian mainland before the introduction of the dingo about 4,000 years ago. After white settlement of Australia they were restricted to Tasmania, and they were hunted out of existence in little over 100 years, aided by bounties. Now the Tasmanian Devil, Tasmania's other major predator, is under threat from Devil Facial Tumour Disease, at least now people are working to try to prevent the Devil's demise.

I was always going to pick up this book as soon as I saw it at the library. I hadn't heard of it before, but it literally leapt off the shelf at me. The back cover blurb calls it a lament for a lost species, and it certainly is that. The words are few, and illustrated by black and white illustrations of caged Tigers. The Tiger in each of the three pages like this becomes faded and more distinct in each image.

Interspersed between these pages are Ron Brook's beautiful painted illustrations of a free Tiger, capturing the Tiger's dreams of freedom, and a life in the wild. Ron Brooks writes very movingly about his paintings for this book on his website (you just need to scroll down a bit). Ron lives in Tasmania, and his love for the Tasmanian landscape is evident in his paintings.

It's a beautiful and moving book. I found this last image particularly poignant.

An Illustrated Year is hosted by An Abundance of Books.