Gleitzman announced as Australian Children’s Laureate for 2018-19

Children’s author Morris Gleitzman has been chosen as the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2018-19.

The author of nearly 40 books for young people, including Two Weeks with the Queen (Pan Macmillan), Boy Overboard, Bumface and the ‘Felix’ series (all Penguin), will be presented with the laureate’s Magpie Award at a ceremony at the State Library of New South Wales on 15 February. He succeeds 2016-17 laureate Leigh Hobbs, and previous laureates Jackie French (2014-15), Alison Lester and Boori Monty Pryor (both 2013-14).

The theme of Gleitzman’s two-year term will be ‘Stories make us—stories create our future’.

Gleitzman told Books+Publishing: ‘I think our individual and collective futures are largely the result of our capacity to imagine the best possibilities in our lives and to look bravely at the worst possibilities, and to use all our creativity and empathy and hope and inspiration and grit and honesty and intelligence and curiosity and cheekiness and insight to make a difference.’

‘I want to be an ambassador for the fears and hopes and dreams and dreads that young people have as they contemplate and navigate today’s world, and also as they think about the possibilities of their future adult worlds,’ Gleitzman said. ‘Much of my time will be spent championing stories as a medium for young people to engage creatively with those possibilities. Stories reveal themselves in our imaginations, our intellects and our emotions—all places where we work on our own destinies.’

The Australian Children’s Laureate initiative was developed by the Australian Children’s Laureate Alliance (ACLA) to ‘promote the importance and transformational power of reading, creativity and story in the lives of young Australians’.

For more information, visit the website here.

Category: Junior Local news