CBCA winners announced

The winners of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards have been announced. The winning titles are:

• Older readers: Between Us (Clare Atkins, Black Inc.)
• Younger readers: His Name Was Walter (Emily Rodda, HarperCollins)
• Early childhood: Tricky’s Bad Day (Alison Lester, Affirm Press)
• Picture books: Cicada (Shaun Tan, Lothian)
• Information books: Sorry Day (Coral Vass, illus by Dub Leffler, NLA)
• Debut illustrator: Daniel Gray-Barnett for Grandma Z (Scribble).

The CBCA’s Nan Chauncy Award for outstanding contribution to Australian children’s literature was also presented to children’s author James Moloney.

Eleni Hale has won the Readings Young Adult Book Prize for her YA novel Stone Girl (Penguin), about a young girl who becomes a ward of the state after the death of her mother.

Kelly Canby’s picture book The Hole Story (Fremantle Press) has won the WA Premier’s Prize for writing for children.

Five Australian YA novels are in the running for the Gold Inky Award, selected by a panel of eight teen judges from around Australia. They are: Hive (A J Betts, Pan), A Thousand Perfect Notes (C G Drews, Orchard Books), Amelia Westlake (Erin Gough, Hardie Grant Egmont), Whisper (Lynette Noni, Pantera) and After the Lights Go Out (Lili Wilkinson, Allen & Unwin).

The shortlists have also been announced for the Environment Award for Children’s Literature, presented annually to fiction and nonfiction books that ‘foster a love of wild places and wildlife in young Australians’ and ‘encourage a sense of responsibility for our natural world’.

Category: Think Junior awards