Dubosarsky announced as Australian Children’s Laureate for 2020–21

Children’s author Ursula Dubosarsky has been chosen as the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2020–21.

Dubosarsky is the author of over 60 books for children and young adults, and her work has been translated into 14 languages. She has won national prizes including the NSW, Victorian, South Australian and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards, the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards, and she has been nominated for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s richest prize for children’s literature.

The theme of Dubosarsky’s two-year term will be ‘Read for your life’.

Dubosarsky told Books+Publishing she hopes to increase the number of children who join their local library during her time as laureate.

‘If children learn to love to read—not just to be able to read—then they will be readers their whole life long. It’s about human motivation. A child has to want to read for themselves, not be told to read,’ said Dubosarsky. ‘Joining the library gives them access to an unbounded wealth of reading material, where slowly they can start to find what they really want to read. A child becomes a lifelong reader not by chance, but by opportunity. That’s how you make a reader for life.’

Dubosarsky succeeds 2018–19 laureate Morris Gleitzman, and previous laureates Leigh Hobbs (2016–17), Jackie French (2014–15), Alison Lester and Boori Monty Pryor (both 2013–14).

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 ACLA website.

(Pictured: Ursula Dubosarsky. Credit: Vicki Skarratt)

Category: Junior Local news