The Inkys winners will be announced a little later (we’ll let you know) have been announced* and The Wheeler Centre has been launched. You’ll be familiar with the name Wheeler in a Lonely Planet context, but now it lives for posterity as the renamed Melbourne Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas after generous funding by Maureen and Tony Wheeler.
You can follow the Centre’s activities on twitter or subscribe to an e-newsletter from the website.
Exciting stuff – trips to Melbourne need to be longer and longer to fit all the culture in. Lucky Melburnians.
The game has been lifted with book trailers. Check out this professional offering from the New Zealand Book Council for Maurice Gee’s Going West (1993), which just goes to show that a book doesn’t have to be freshly published to get top trailer treatment.
Via twitter and numerous RTs – it came to us from @misrule_au
American Born Chinese broke new ground when it became the first graphic novel be nominated for the US National Book Award and also the first to win the Michael L. Printz Award in 2007.
It skilfully intertwines the legend of the Monkey King with a story of immigration and cultural heritage, and speaks to all who have struggled with identity and belonging with a relevance far beyond just the US experience. The contribution of colourist Lark Pien to the extrardinary look and feel of this book should not be overlooked.
The Story Museum will be a wonderful gift from Oxford, where so many stories have begun, to the whole world,” Pullman said. “The whole atmosphere of the city is rich with fantasy. Indeed, the very idea of having a museum devoted to story is itself such a fantastical notion than no other city in the world could have given birth to it.
The publishers have tagged this one ‘adult’ so it hasn’t been marketed to teens, although it has lots of YA-relevant themes. Here is the Fiction Focus review, too.
Four books. Only four, yet all have been on the awards radar and some have received great honours indeed. We can but speculate what else the late Siobhan Dowd might have written had her life been longer. But we can celebrate these four marvellous books and the richness that her writing has brought to young adult literature. The first Carnegie Medal to be awarded posthumously was for this week’s featured title, Bog Child (2007), which was finished three months before Siobhan Dowd’s death.
There’s a terrific conversation happening right now over at the ccbc-net listserv about reviewing. Audience, rationale, the whys and wherefores. And while we don’t have the permission of the contributors to quote them verbatim, here are some ABCs arising out of the thread:
Audience. To whom is the reviewer accountable? Author? Publisher? Readers? All of the above? None of the above? If for a print journal, then the scope of the publication will be clear, but the rise of reviewing blogs has made the water murky.
Balance. Negativity for its own sake or to show how clever the reviewer is for noticing a problem is not helpful. As one person said if only a small proportion of the book is unsatisfactory for whatever reason but the majority of the review is about pointing this out, that’s unfair to the book.
Close reading. Some reviewers read a book three or four times before submitting a review and only then after rereading and revising it. The author deserves slow, considered engagement: (paraphrased) ‘a fast food opinion isn’t fair to a slowly cooked book’.
And, we are urged to remember, it’s much harder to write a book than review one.
It feels as if this thread has arisen spontaneously so it might not be archived on the website as one of its formal discussion topics, but you can certainly access the email discussion if you sign up to receive posts. Posts from ccbc-net are generally considered and therefore worth receiving.
After ten years of Discworld, Terry Pratchett (Sir Terence Pratchett) has created a very differentworld in Nation (2008). Set in n a parallel universe rather like our 19th century South Pacific this is a multi-faceted disaster-survival / coming-of-age story that explores many themes. There is no book trailer as such for this title, so here is Terry Pratchett talking about how Nation came to be (the US cover is featured):
Terry Pratchett speaks in The Times about living with Alzheimer’s Disease (25/1/2009)
And in The Independent: Nation – the one that’s just come out – that’s a book for kids. And people will say: ‘Well it covers very adult subjects …’ Yeah, that’s why it’s a book for kids. Because you want kids to grow up to be adults, not just bigger kids.”
Dreaming, as one does, of travel and always thinking about books and reading, Fiction Focus has compiled a far-from-complete list of 2010 literary festivals that bring together two of life’s most rewarding pursuits. Happy to add others if you bring them to our attention.
You knew that the ABC was launching a dedicated kids’ channel soon, right? ABC3 will hit our screens on 4 December.
You might not be aware, however, that they are planning to screen Nadia Wheatley’s and Donna Rawlins’s much loved classic, My Place as a 13-part series. And as this series commences on the opening day of the channel, it certainly augurs well for quality children’s television programming from the ABC.
My Place will screen in 13 half-hour episodes on weeknights at 8pm from 4 December. The story starts on Sorry Day 2008 and finishes in 1788.
There will soon be a dedicated website for My Place. Meanwhile, you can read about the series here and here.
The Fiction Focus Blog is published by Curriculum Materials Information Services (CMIS), Department of Education and Training, Western Australia. It is designed to provide news about current events, resources and research to assist teachers and teacher librarians engage teenagers with books and reading.
It’s all happening in Melbourne today.
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literature promotion | Tagged: awards, InkyAwards | 
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