A to Z Blogging Challenge 2018: G is for Morris Gleitzman and Andy Griffiths

Today I am introducing you to two very different Aussie writers for young people. Morris Gleitzman writes stories from family relationships to the adventures of a young Jewish lad during and after World War II. Andy Griffiths, who keeps winning awards from children, not judges, is simply funny. Very funny! And, different as they are, they did once produce a series together, Wicked. 

Let’s start with Morris Gleitzman. He is the current Australian Children’s Laureate, a job that will keep him busy for two years. 

Last year I took my students to hear him speak at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. Even those who hadn’t read his books before bought copies immediately to get signed, if they had the money(I bought some copies for those who didn’t have the money). One young man started reading the next day and became a huge fan. 

He is a prolific author, so I can only talk about a few of his books. Let’s start with Two Weeks With The Queen. That one was our Year 7 English text some years ago, so may have been the first of his books I read. The young Australian hero is sent to stay with family in England because his little brother is dying. He decides that the Queen must have the best doctor in the world and spends much of the novel trying to communicate with her so that the doctor can be sent to save his brother. Along the way, he meets two gay men, one of whom is dying of AIDS, and helps them spend the dying partner’s last days together, something the hospital has made difficult. The novel was gentle, sad and unexpectedly funny at times. It’s short and can almost be read in a single sitting, but powerful stuff. 

Boy Overboard is about a refugee boy and his family who travel through enormous danger only to find themselves in one of those dreadful Australian detention centres our awful governments of the past several years have set up to “stop the boats.” The young man’s voice is so delightful you can’t help but empathise with him.

In the sequel, Girl Underground, a girl doing a school project involving writing to kids in the detention centre decides to help him escape. The novel is seen from her viewpoint, not his.

Morris Gleitzman has also written funny stories and historical fiction and novels about family issues, but is best known these days for the Once series. The young hero, Felix, is a Jewish boy fleeing the Nazis, fighting with the Resistance and, after the war, trying to help people who need it in what is left of Poland, including a young girl who is pregnant and an orphaned baby. He eventually gets to Australia and trains as a doctor. Oddly, the third novel in the series, right in the middle of Felix’s adventures, is set in modern Australia and seen from the viewpoint of Felix’s granddaughter Zelda, who is living with him while her parents are off overseas doing good with an aid agency. So you know he will be fine, before the next novel takes you back to the war years and teenage Felix’s time with the Resistance, where he learns his first medical skills. Felix has a heart of gold! 

All I can say is that our kids love this series. I’ve had Year 7 students pounce on the latest book with cries of delight because they missed it in primary school. He has been on the Children’s Book Council of Australia shortlist several times. 

Andy Griffiths will never be on the CBCA shortlist. He just doesn’t write the sort of books adult judges deem worthy of an award. He does, however, tend to win in the YABBA awards every year. The YABBAs are voted on by his readers. A number of his books have been turned into plays which are performed during the school holidays. One of these is Just Macbeth in which his regular characters from the Just series of books find themselves thrown back in time and becoming characters from the Scottish Play while practising some scenes for school. It’s a great introduction to Shakespeare for children. The most popular series at the moment is the Treehouse series, which started as The 13 Storey Treehouse and had, the last I heard, got up to 104 Storeys! They are illustrated by his regular illustrator and friend Terry Denton. The two of them perform together for their fans at the YABBA Award presentations every year, then sit down to sign. The queues are so long that when I went last year, long after the rest of us were enjoying lunch after doing our signings, they were still signing. I hope there was food left for them! 

The series Schooling Around - Treasure Fever, Pencil Of Doom, Mascot Madness and Robot Riot -  is centred around the adventures of a primary school class and their zany teacher. Mr Griffiths kindly gave me the whole set for my school when new covers were released, which was great as the old copies  were always going missing.  

Andy Griffiths is, in my opinion, the successor to Paul Jennings, of whom I will write later in this series. Like Paul Jennings, he has recognised that children like over-the-top stuff, fiction or non. The Just! stories rely on that. One that I have read with my classes many times, “Gorillagram”, has a boy dressing up as a gorilla to annoy his sister during her sixteenth birthday party at a posh restaurant. He gets stuck in the costume and is carried off to the zoo. His short story “The Day My Bum Went Psycho” ended up as a series of novels. (In the US “Bum” became “Butt” because the word bum has a different meaning there.) Dear me, what a huge fuss what made here when the first story was published! How very vulgar!  And yet, it was just - intentionally - a silly story about a boy whose backside detaches itself and runs away into Melbourne’s CBD. In this universe, it’s not even unusual. There is an entire brigade of “bum catchers”. 

Andy Griffiths is one of Australia’s best-loved children’s writers and has done very well overseas as well, even if he will never win a CBCA Award. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting hold of his books wherever you live, as they have been released in 30 countries. Do it - your kids will love you! 

Buy his books and Morris Gleitzman’s, here. 

Morris Gleitzman

Amazon          

Booktopia

Book Depository

Andy Griffiths

Amazon

Booktopia

Book Depository 

Or just ask at your local good bookstore! 

Monday: Stephen Herrick, author of gentle YA verse novels 

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2018: F Is For Fox, French and Flanagan!

Three Aussie children’s writers today! 

First, picture book author Mem Fox. You probably know her best for Possum Magic and Where Is The Green Sheep?  which I reviewed - very enthusiastically - many years ago for January Magazine. Who would have known then that it would become such a classic? https://www.januarymagazine.com/kidsbooks/whereisgreensheep.html

Possum Magic, which she wrote with illustrator Julie Vivas, is the story of a small possum who becomes invisible and has to travel Australia tasting many Australian foods to become visible again. It’s sweet and charming and still being read by parents and children thirty-five years after its first publication. 

Where Is The Green Sheep? was published in 2004 and has also become a classic. It is one of those books you read with your toddler. This one is illustrated by the delightful Judy Horacek, better known for her gentle feminist cartoons. The young audience is invited to search for a green sheep among all those multicoloured sheep romping on hillsides, fixing cars, going to space, skiing... Needless to say, it’s still in print, not only in Australia. Mem Fox is a much loved writer who has made it more than once into the list of Australia’s favourite writers, an annual vote by readers of the Booktopia web site. 

Multi-award winner Jackie French has written many historical novels for children and teens, though she has recently also done some adult historical fiction, the Miss Lily trilogy, which I’m reading. She is one of the few historical novelists my students will read, by the way. She has done a lot of novels about Australian history. There is a trilogy, Hitler’s Daughter, Pennies For Hitler and Goodbye, Mr Hitler, which all have Australian connections and end up in Australia after the war. A Rose For The Anzac Boys is a YA novel about three girls running a canteen for wounded soldiers in France during World War I. That, too, has Aussie connections. Nanberry : Black Brother White is set during the days of the First Fleet, as seen from the viewpoint of an Indigenous Australian boy being brought up by the surgeon. He eventually becomes a sailor. Both characters were real people. 

But she has also written novels set anywhere from ancient Egypt to mediaeval Scotland, and some fantasy fiction. One of the most popular of her 140 books is a picture book, illustrated by Bruce Whatley, Diary Of A Wombat. Not surprising, as she lives with wombats and tweets about them most days! 

Jackie has recently completed her two years stint as Australian Children’s Laureate. 

John Flanagan is the author of the hugely bestselling Ranger’s Apprentice and Brotherband series. They read like YA, but were originally written for younger readers. In fact, when I was reading for the children's section of the Aurealis Awards the other year, one of the Brotherband novels made it to our shortlist. The hero of Ranger’s Apprentice is Will, an orphan in a mediaeval universe. In the course of the series he grows up and becomes a Ranger, one of the King’s law enforcers, trained by Halt, a likeable and cheeky man who really knows his business. Will is small, but agile and intelligent. The author originally wrote it for his son, who was himself small and needed to be persuaded that small people can do great things too.  The novels are exciting, but also funny. Although they are set in an alternative universe in which coffee is available in a sort of mediaeval Europe and women are allowed to play active roles in the England equivalent, Araluen(the name, by the way, of a town in NSW!) there is very little actual fantasy in these books. There is some in the first two books, which feature telepathic beings working for the villain, but after that, it might as well be historical fiction.

 Brotherband is a spin-off series, set in the Viking equivalent country, Skandia, about a bunch of boys who are the ones who are never chosen for sporting teams and have to make up their own "Brotherband", a group training in boot camp for their future as warriors. That’s okay, because they are led by a young genius, Hal, who keeps inventing things, including a ship, the Heron, that works better than the traditional Viking ships. In this world, the Vikings - Skandians - have stopped raiding because they do better being hired to protect the countries they used to raid, from pirates and other sea thugs. The female characters, both in this and the Ranger’s Apprentice series are all strong, intelligent and kick-ass. 

There has long been talk of a Ranger's Apprentice film, but nothing has happened so far, alas! 

You should be able to buy books by any of these writers either in ebook or print by visiting the usual sites - Amazon, Booktopia or Book Depository.

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2018: E Is For Hazel Edwards!

Aussie Children's Writers - E

Hazel Edwards is a multiple award-winning Melbourne children’s writer. 

Some years ago, I was actually sitting with her at a signing table at a Melbourne bookshop. We were there with our publisher, Ford Street, at a shopping centre. The bookshop had invited us to make an afternoon of it. We all had to read to children and spend some time at the tables, signing. 

Hazel very kindly advised me how to spend my time while waiting for people to come and get their copies of our books signed, don’t just sit there, keep busy but at the same time not so busy that people who want their books signed will go away. As the most prolific writer I knew, who did this all the time, she was worth listening to. 

Her newest book at the time was a YA novel for Ford Street, which she was, after all, there to promote. It was F2M: The Boy Within, which she had written with a young trans man called Ryan Kennedy. I’ve reviewed it on this blog, here. F2M is a delightful story about a girl who knows she is really a boy and is researching ways to transition. The only real problem is how to tell, not just her family, but her all-girl punk rock band. It was not a victim story at all - and it told me as much about punk rock as it did about the trans community(two of the characters were a married couple where the husband had been a woman and the wife had been a man). So, yes, a lovely book. 

The thing is, she is hugely popular for a children’s picture book she wrote many years ago, There’s A Hippopotamus On Our Roof Eating Cake, illustrated by Deborah Niland. I got a copy signed for my great niece Dezzy, a fan, when she was little. Dezzy is now eighteen and working part time in a bookshop - and it was old then. Imagine having a book still in print and popular after thirty-eight years! The book is certainly a classic, which has even been turned into a musical and a short film, but Hazel was there to sign her newest book if she could. 

Guess what one bookshop customer after another brought instead? Adults would come up with a smile and say, “I loved this when I was a child!” I don’t think they sold a single copy of F2M that day, but plenty of copies of Hippo, apart from well loved personal copies brought to the table.  

Here is a link to a YouTube video of Hazel reading Hippo at a public library. Watch and enjoy! 

Hazel Edwards has written so many books, mostly for younger children, that it is hard to keep up with them all - two hundred, according to her web site. There is a lot of fiction, but also non fiction. She once spent some time in Antarctica for research! Hazel Edwards is not too proud to take on any theme that might make a book of interest to young readers or adults - and the fact that she recognises you can turn pretty much anything into a book means she is one of a handful of Australian writers who can make a living out of it. 

 Hazel recognises that children want to see themselves in books. A recent one was Hijabi Girl, written with a Muslim teacher librarian. Despite her huge popularity she had to self publish that one, because publishers just couldn’t see that there would be a market for it. The last I heard, it was doing well. It’s interesting to note that even a writer who is pretty much a living national treasure might still be rejected by a publisher. In fact, I heard her speak at the Jewish Writers’ Festival, with Anna Ciddor, whose book The Family With Two Front Doors had also taken some time to find a publisher(“lovely book, but no market for it”) and is now being sold outside Australia and translated into Polish. 

If you’re interested in learning more about this wonderful writer, here is her web site. It has videos, teacher notes and much more, 

Here is an interview with her published on this blog a couple of years ago. I admit that she supplied the questions - Hazel Edwards certainly knows how to self promote! 

And here is where you can buy her books, as well as in all good bookshops. 

Amazon

Booktopia

Book Depository 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2018: D is for Ursula Dubosarsky

And here is another fabulous Aussie children’s writer for you! 

Ursula Dubosarsky is an amazing Australian children’s author born in Sydney. She has won a heap of awards for her books and has been on the CBCA shortlist several times. She has written about forty books, including anything from books for younger readers to YA. 

The first book of hers I read was The First Book Of Samuel, which was on the CBCA shortlist that year. It took the Biblical story of the child Samuel and updated it to modern Australia. Samuel is a little boy whose grandfather is a Holocaust survivor and his father is p an opera singer, of all things! Odd, but if you are familiar with the Biblical story, you’ll pick it up.   

The Red Shoe is historical fiction, set in Australia in the 1950s, during the Petrov Affair, when a married couple defected from the Soviet Union. The red shoe of the title refers to a shoe dropped by Mrs Petrov when the KGB were dragging her to the plane. It has become an iconic image here. The Petrov Affair is seen from the viewpoint of children. 

YA novel The Golden Day has a flavour of Picnic At Hanging Rock, though no, it isn’t about schoolgirls going missing on a rock! Hard to explain, but it has a similar haunting atmosphere. Actually, I’ve found that her books in general have a haunting quality. 

A book of hers for younger readers was published by Christmas Press, an illustrated story book called Two Tales Of Twins From Greece And Ancient Rome, retelling the stories of Artemis and Apollo and Romulus and Remus. She also read the text for the audiobook version. I’ve reviewed both on this blog(check out the links above). 

And here is her web site. http://ursuladubosarsky.squarespace.com It has information about all of her books plus videos, teachers’ notes, craft activities, a podcast interview and a direct email address! About all it doesn’t seem to have is where you can buy her books, so here are a few links from me. 

Amazon 

Booktopia

Book Depository 

Most are available in any good bookstore and many in ebook or audiobook. Buy, read, enjoy!

The 2018 Guide To Manuscript Publishers: 172 Traditional Publishers: No Agent Required

Reposted from Amazon

This is a market guide to quite a few publishers, written by Emily Harstone  and published under the imprint of Authors Publish. They are not vanity presses and they are all publishers which consider unagented work. Each entry - under a theme, eg non fiction, literary fiction, science fiction - is thoroughly researched and, if there are issues with the company concerned, will tell you what they are. It doesn’t advise you not to submit, just tells you what problems you might have if you do. There are links to publisher web sites, including submissions guidelines, but also to forums on Absolute Write that discuss the publisher. Be aware that some of these Absolute Write discussions are several years old, but you do get to see what experiences writers have had with some of the publishers listed.

I have been flipping through this publication and making notes as I go. I’ve found the links very handy - something you couldn’t do in a print book! I have skipped ones that were not genres that interested me. Probably not a good idea to try reading this from cover to cover, but you don’t have to. The book ends with a useful glossary of publishing terms you may not know, and a section about submitting your work for publication.

I wouldn’t have minded a bit more information about royalties or advances, but I have found that many publishers just don’t tell you that on their submissions pages. Where there was information, the author has mentioned it.

This book has made my life a lot easier and saved me much research. Definitely recommended if you’re a writer looking for a publisher. Although these don’t require agents, you can have your agent send your work for you if you have one.

Available from Amazon. 

Blogging A To Z 2018: C Is For Collins, Costain, Crowley and Ciddor

This post will have to include more than one. As it is, I’ve had to cut it down to four. 

Paul Collins is the founder of Ford Street Publishing. When I first knew him, it was as my local secondhand bookseller, who published SF and fantasy for adults. Many years later, he turned to writing for children. There is an interview with him on this blog about a children’s fantasy series he was writing with Sean McMullen, but he has written - and published - a huge number of children’s books of various kinds - fiction, non fiction, education titles and trade books. He is one of the few writers in Australia I know who has been able to make a living from writing and write pretty much anything he is asked to do. 

I’m finally getting around to reading Harry Kruize, Born To Lose, which was published last year. There will be a review! 

His partner, Meredith Costain, was also interviewed here about her contribution to the humorous children's anthology Laugh Your Head Off Again and Again. She is also been making a living from writing, something very difficult to do in Australia, writing both trade and education stuff, all of it wonderful. Meredith helped me launch our books in the It's True! series.

YA writer Cath Crowley was, at one time, a teacher. She was in London, writing letters to her brother about it, when he decided to turn her life into a musical! Quite a good one, too, as I recall. The first of her books I read was The Life And Times Of Gracie Faltrain, the first of a series about a girl soccer player. They were funny and sweet, but she went on to do even better. Graffiti Moon, a YA novel about teens running around Melbourne on the last night of their school career, was simply beautiful and funny. The author completely understands how teens think and feel. She tells a story about travelling around the western suburbs of Melbourne  late at night while researching the book. Some scary looking boys approached her... and asked her to pose as their mother so they could get into a nightclub, as they were under age! 

I personally think it should have won the CBCA Award that year, as did my student Selena, who interviews Cath Crowley here. It was shortlisted, but didn’t win. Last year she was shortlisted for her bookshop romance Words In Deep Blue. It received an Honour(runner up). Some time soon she has to win! Last year also she was part of a collaboration with two other wonderful writers, Simmone Howell and Fiona Wood, Take Three Girls. Both Simmone and Fiona have also been interviewed on this site.

Anna Ciddor is a Melbourne children’s writer. Her earlier books were for the education industry. She wrote some non fiction for Allen and Unwin in the True Stories series, Unplugged: The Bare Facts On Toilets Through The Ages. Anna writes quirky, over-the-top stories. She wrote Viking Magic,  a trilogy of Viking-themed novels about two children swapped at birth by the midwife. The girl is the daughter of a farmer who wanted a boy to help on the farm and threatened to expose a female child. The boy comes from a magic user family who don’t care what they get. As a result, the farmer gets a son who is not much use at farming, but very good at fixing crop problems with magic and the magic users, who are totally useless at housework, get a daughter who can’t do magic but can keep the house running nicely for them. The novels have messages in runes at the bottom of each page. They are great fun! 

In more recent years, she has written The Family With Two Front Doors, a gentle, biographical novel about her grandmother’s childhood in 1920s Poland, which she has also illustrated beautifully. Here is my post about it. And here is my interview with Anna. Enjoy! 

Stop Press! I just heard from Anna Ciddor, who tells me The Family With Two Front Doors is now available in the US, the UK and about to be translated into Polish!

If you’re interested in checking out any of these amazing writers, here are some links. 

Web sites

Anna Ciddor: http://www.annaciddor.com/

Cath Crowley: https://www.cathcrowleyauthor.com/

Meredith Costain: https://www.meredithcostain.com/

Paul Collins: http://www.paulcollins.com.au/

And as Paul is also a publisher of children's and YA books, here is the web site of Ford Street Publishing.

Most of these books should be available on line or in your local bookstore.

A To Z Challenge 2018: B Is For Graeme Base

Graeme Base was born in England, but came to Australia as a child, so he counts as one of us! He started off in advertising. It didn’t take him long to change over to illustrating children’s books, then writing and illustrating his own.  

His most famous book, Animalia, failed to win the Children’s Book Council Award when it came out in the 1980s. The book that did win, by the way, is forgotten by anyone who wasn’t around at the time, whereas Animalia has already celebrated its silver anniversary. It has won some child-voted awards, the YABBA and KOALA prizes, and there are some apps based on it. It says something about judged awards. It’s always exciting to win one, and I have done judging myself, but judges can get it wrong. I remember asking one of that year's judges, a friend of mine, why Animalia hadn’t won and was told it just didn’t meet the criteria. A bit odd considering it made the shortlist, in fact was the runner-up(Honour Book). 

Animalia is an alphabet book with a difference. Each letter of the alphabet is a double page spread with alliteration. “Lazy Lions Lounging In The Local Library”, for example, shows one of Graeme Base’s magnificent paintings, in this case lions sitting around in a library, books in paws. Around them the reader has to pick up pictures of other words starting with L, eg lamp, lizard, leprechaun. A friend of mine who works at a private school which can afford these things told me that they got permission to put this one up as a mural at his library. 

The D page, “Diabolical Dragons Daintily Devouring Delicious Delicacies”, is subtler. Outside you see the Doctor(Tom Baker) and a Dalek, but also in the background, a very small picture of someone looking up at a knife hanging above him on a thread. Dagger, but also, if you’re an adult reading it with your children, “Damocles.” The paintings are exquisite! Kids in my library used to spend whole lunchtimes browsing through it, admittedly mostly for the “where’s Wally?” style little boy who was meant to be the author. But kids don’t vote awards just for “Where’s Wally?” Graeme Base has written and drawn a lot more since then, all of it stunningly beautiful, a lot of them with messages. One of them, The Worst Band In The Universe, includes a CD of music written and performed by the author, who was in a band himself before becoming a writer-illustrator. 

One of his early books was of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. There is more to it than just illustrating  the Carroll poem. His artwork comments. The last picture shows the Jabberwock’s head on the wall, along with other extinct animals. 

One year, I went to hear him at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, with my brother and his artist wife. During the questions, my sister in law asked, “If you want to draw a hippo, do you do it from a photo or go to the zoo?” 

The interviewer quipped, “He goes to Africa!”

Whether he does or doesn’t, his beautiful books appeal to children and adults alike. 


Here is his web site.


And here are some places where you can buy his books, as well as your local bookshops

Amazon

Booktopia

Book Depository

Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies by Jackie French. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2017

Each year at secluded Shillings Hall, in the snow-crisped English countryside, the mysterious Miss Lily draws around her young women selected from Europe's royal and most influential families. Her girls are taught how to captivate a man - and find a potential husband - at a dinner, in a salon, or at a grouse shoot, and in ways that would surprise outsiders. For in 1914, persuading and charming men is the only true power a woman has.

Sophie Higgs is the daughter of Australia's king of corned beef and the only 'colonial' brought to Shillings Hall. Of all Miss Lily's lovely ladies, however, she is also the only one who suspects Miss Lily's true purpose.

Australian girl Sophie Higgs has a lot of money and a father who adores her. He gives her anything she wants - except the chance to use her abilities to help in the business. When she plans to get married at eighteen to the boy on the next property, he tells her she is too young and sends her to England for a year, as one of Miss Lily’s chosen students. With three other girls she learns some valuable lessons, makes friends and, when war comes, finds ways to use her ability for organisation- and the skills she leaned from Miss Lily ... 

I’ve read several of this author’s children’s and YA historical novels(the only historical fiction I can get the kids to read at my school), so, although this one is aimed at adults - perhaps in the recent category of “New Adult”? - I did pick up that it’s set in the same universe, so to speak, as her YA novel A Rose For The Anzac Boys, in which a group of wealthy girls set up a canteen for wounded soldiers in France during World War I. One of the characters from that novel, Ethel, arrives in England to ask Sophie for help with supplies. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read that book, but a nice surprise if you have.

Needless to say, Sophie is in Europe for a lot longer than a year. She can’t get back to Australia anyway, due to the dangers of being bombed, and, despite the horrors of the war, she finds that what she is doing makes her happier than she has ever been. 

I must admit, I didn’t see that ending coming, though there were hints throughout the book. I won’t tell you what it is. 

This is the first of a trilogy which ends in the 1940s and Book 2 is already available. If you’re reading it in ebook, there is a free novella, “With Love From Miss Lily: A Christmas Story” in iBooks. I’ve downloaded it, of course, and have just started the second book. 

I always enjoy Jackie French’s historical fiction and this one is no exception.

Highly recommended.

Buy it here, at Booktopia.

The author’s web site is here. She is a former Australian Children’s Laureate. Judging by her tweets, she spends a lot of time with the wombats around her home!