Refugee Asylum Seeker Book List

I really enjoyed this list of stories for children about refugees and asylum seekers from Book Trust.

It's the humanitarian issue of our time really and I think deserves it's own list that can continue to be expanded as I've done with Brona's War Book List. I've added a few already, and will add more over time -as I remember them, and new books as they come up. 

A Dangerous Crossing - Jane Mitchell
A Long Walk to Water - Linda Sue Park
Alpha: Abidjan to Gare du Nord - Barroux, Sarah Ardizzone (translator)

A Story Like The Wind - Gill Lewis, Jo Weaver (illustrator)
Azzi in Between - Sarah Garland

Boy Overboard - Morris Gleitzman

Girl Underground - Morris Gleitzman
Give Me Shelter - Tony Bradman (editor)

Home and Away - John Marsden, Matt Ottley (illustrator)
Hope in a Ballet Shoe - Michaela & Elaine De Prince

Illegal - Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin
In The Sea There are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda, Howard Curtis (translator)
Inside Out & Back Again - Thanhha Lai (see my review)
Jackdaw Summer - David Almond

My Name is Not Refugee - Kate Milner
My Two Blankets - Irena Kobald, Freya Blackwood (illustrator) (see my review)

Now is the Time for Running - Michael Williams

Oranges in No Man's Land - Elizabeth Laird

Refuge - Anne Booth, Sam Usher (illustrator)
Refuge - Jackie French
Refugee - Alan Gratz
Refugee Boy - Benjamin Zephaniah
Refugees - David Miller

Shadow - Michael Morpurgo
Soraya The Story Teller - Rosanne Hawke
Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family's Journey - Margaret Ruurs, Nizar Ali Badr (artist)
Suri's Wall - Lucy Estela, Matt Ottley (illustrator) 

The Arrival - Shaun Tan (see my review)
The Bone Sparrow - Zana Fraillon
The Island - Armin Greder
The Journey - Francesca Sanna
The Lines We Cross - Randa Abdel-Fattah
The Little Refugee - Anh Do, Suzanne Do, Bruce Whatley (illustrator) (see my review)
The Milk of Birds - Sylvia Whitman
The Other Side of Truth - Beverley Naidoo

The Red Pencil - Andrea Davis Pinkney
The Silence Seeker - Ben Morley, Carl Pearce (illustrator)
The Silver Sword - Ian Serraillier
The Treasure Box - Margaret Wild, Freya Blackwood (illustrator) (see my review)

Welcome to Nowhere - Elizabeth Laird
When Michael Met Mina - Randa Abdel-Fattah

Ziba Came on a Boat - Liz Lofthouse, Robert Ingpen (illustrator)

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. 

My Two Blankets

My Two Blankets is a lovely picture book from newcomer Irena Kobald and the wonderful Freya Blackwood. It has been shortlisted for Picture Book of the Year in the 2015 Children's Book Council of Australia Awards. 

My Two Blankets is the story of two girls. Cartwheel was born in a war torn African country, but moves to a new country, which is never specified, and could be anywhere really, but for our purposes it's Australia of course.

We came to this country to be safe.
Everything was strange.
The people were strange. 

I've never been to Africa, but can't imagine what a culture shock it would be to move to suburban Australia. Especially if you don't have the blanket of English to wrap yourself in. Cartwheel feels these new, foreign words and sounds as a waterfall of strange sounds. If you've ever travelled anywhere where you don't understand the language at all you understand some of that feeling. Cartwheel is lonely, isolated and sad without any access to her new English speaking world. Then she meets a little girl at the park who helps her gradually cross the English speaking divide. 

My Two Blankets is a wonderful, gentle exploration of the refugee experience. Irena Kobald has said that she "had to" write this book. 

It just poured out of me in about half an hour after experiencing a special meeting with Sudanese refugees, where nobody spoke any English for several hours. 

I think this one is my favourite illustration. It reminds me a little of Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing and references to Edward Hopper and John Brack (see my review for what I mean)

Picture source

When I saw Freya Blackwood speak at the recent Bathurst Writers Festival she spoke of her work illustrating this book. To make Cartwheel and her mother stand out from their Australian surroundings she used red oil against the cooler watercolours of the background. It's certainly a very effective technique, it's really very striking. Freya wrote a great blog post about creating her illustrations for this book. I haven't finished reading all the shortlist for the Picture Book category, but I wish Freya Blackwood very well, this one definitely could win.

http://australianwomenwriters.com

Bathurst Writers Festival

I have a long term goal to get to all of Australia's Writers Festivals. So far I've been to Melbourne Writers Festival ( a few times), Sydney Writer's Festival (twice now), Newcastle Writers Festival, Mudgee Readers Festival (did you see what they did there? Love it). And just recently I accidentally went along to the Bathurst Writers Festival.

How can you go accidentally? Well you see I thought I was going to a Sydney Writers' Festival Regional Live Streaming event, which I think was a new concept for this year.

And I did. I got to see David Walliams' session- which naturally was great, and I should tell you about it sometime. But I also went along to a live event that day, and it turns out that this was part of the inaugural Bathurst Writer's Festival. 

The live event I went to was Writing for Children. It featured four local authors and illustrators. I've seen Freya Blackwood speak quite a few times before, but I admire her work greatly and am always interested in what she has to say. The other three authors were all completely new to me- it was great to learn that there are so many local authors working away. Greg Bastian. Louisa (L.J) Clarkson. Jeffery E Doherty. 

Each of the authors spoke about their work. Freya is of course the most well known. She is an illustrator who considers herself a story teller too, which is obvious when you think about it, particularly with those exceptional illustrators such as Freya who do more thoughtful and deliberate work. Freya enjoys the amount of extra story she can add through her illustrations.

Greg Bastion writes historical fiction for upper primary/lower secondary schools. He spoke of writing his latest book The Goldseekers, about two Korean children living on the Australian goldfields of the 1850s.

Louisa writes as LJ Clarkson and seems to write aimed at the American market, which I must admit disappointed me a bit. She writes magical YA, and mainly spoke of her novel, The Silver Strand, where a girl has a magical grey hair. Her books often have a bullying theme.

Jeff Doherty was the most exuberant of the authors this day- obvious before he even spoke as he was resplendent in a colourful vest. He is an author/illustrator who works in a school and writes junior fiction. Interestingly he said that he hated reading as a child and didn't read his first novel until he was in Year 11. He wants to write the book he would have liked to read as a kid.

At one stage the panel recommended their favourite books for young people. And they're a great selection of books.

Greg Bastion - The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Freya Blackwood - Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak
LJ Clarkson - Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer (see my review)
Jeff Doherty - The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman (see my review) and Thirteen Reasons Why - Jay Asher (which sounds amazing, straight to the TBR).

I hope the Bathurst Writer's Festival continues to develop and evolve and look forward to seeing how it progresses.

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

The Runaway Hug

The Runaway Hug won the Children's Book Council of Australia Early Childhood Book of the Year this year. And deservedly so, for it turns the cuteness factor up to 11. 

I was a bit surprised to see that I hadn't blogged directly about Freya Blackwood before. We live in the same town in Central NSW, and I've been reading and loving her books for years, and have seen her speak at several events. I did include her in my guest post last year on Whispering Gums. 

Freya has a distinctive, warm drawing style that is perfect for picture books. She has been remarkably successful illustrating for a broad range of international and Australian writers. Her book with Roddy Doyle, Her Mother's Face, is up there as one of my all time favourite books. 

The premise of The Runaway Hug is cute too. Toddler Lucy wants a goodnight hug from Mum. Mum is busy doing the washing (in her undies) but of course has time to give Lucy a hug. Although it's her last hug and she needs it back. 

Picture source

Lucy has to give a hug to the whole family, whether they want it or not.

Picture source

I think the illustrations of ordinary family life are just great. Beautifully captured vignettes of a family settling down for the night. 

Picture source

It's amazing to read on Freya's blog that she didn't meet Nick Bland until they were both at the CBCA Awards! I guess technology can help bridge the distance these days, but it does seem weird that two people can create a book together, and not have actually met. Nick Bland lives in Darwin, one of his other books, The Very Cranky Bear, has been everywhere this year. I must get to reading it.