Children’s books honoured at environment awards

Three children’s books with environmental themes have been honoured at the Wilderness Society’s Environment Award for Children’s Literature. They are: the picture book The All New Must Have Orange 430 (Michael Speechley, Viking), which explores our obsession with owning stuff; junior fiction Maxi the Lifeguard: The Stormy Protest (Trent Maxwell & David Lawrence, illus by Peter Baldwin, Affirm); and children’s nonfiction Bouncing Back: An Eastern Barred Bandicoot Story (Rohan Cleave & Coral Tulloch, CSIRO Publishing). The awards are presented to books that ‘foster a love of wild places and wildlife in young Australians’ and ‘encourage a sense of responsibility for our natural world’.

Zobi and the Zoox: A Story of Coral Bleaching (Ailsa Wild, Aviva Reed, Briony Barr & Gregory Crocetti, CSIRO Publishing) has won the Whitley Medal, presented by the Royal Zoological Society of NSW for outstanding publications that profile the unique wildlife of the Australasian region.

Writer Clare Atkins and illustrator Lisa Kennedy have been selected for the 2020 International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Honour List. Atkins was chosen for her YA novel Between Us (Black Inc.) and Kennedy for her illustrations in Wilam: A Birrarung story (Aunty Joy Murphy & Andrew Kelly, Walker Books).

Six books by Australian and New Zealand authors and illustrators have been included in the 2019 White Ravens list for international children’s and youth literature.

A number of children’s and YA books have been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the Queensland Literary Awards.

Category: Think Junior awards