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.

* Silver Inky: The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)

Gold Inky – Where the Streets had a Name (Randa Abdel-Fattah).  More here.

• Siobhan Dowd for Solace of the Road
• Mary Hoffman for Troubadour
• Patrick Ness for The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking: Book Two)
• Anna Perera for Guantanamo Boy

The winners of each category (Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s) will be announced on January 5 and the overall winner on January 26. We see that Clive James is in the running for the Poetry Award.

Claudette Colvin

The winners of the National Book Awards (US) were announced earlier today, with the winner for Young People’s Literature going to Phillip Hoose for Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice.

We may or may not see this important, true story published here in Australia, but let’s hope we do. It tells of a little-known teenager who stood up for what she believed in during the dark days of the 1950s and the fledgling Civil Rights movement.

A week or so ago, Monica Edinger posted in her blog about a book event where Phillip Hoose spoke about the making of the book and where Claudette Colvin also told her story.  She was reminded of her father’s brush with Rosa Parks, a more famous Civil Rights figure of the time, in Montgomery, Alabama. Here is his story.

Image of Claudette Colvin used under Creative Commons licence

Earlier this month, in this post, we congratulated all the Australian authors who had been nominated. The list that these were extrapolated from is here. Nominations only. That was clear enough and reason enough to rejoice. There was no Margo, no Melina.  We did wonder, but ours is not to reason why.

Now this undated list has popped up, which appears to be the final goods, and yea, both appear on it. Good news indeed. So does Juliet Marillier, but we’ve lost all the other Aussies we were so warmly applauding only 10 days ago. No Michelle Cooper, no Alison Goodman, no Steven Herrick, no Catherine Jinks, no Justine Larbalestier, no Shaun Tan.

So congratulations Margo, Melina and Juliet – wonderful news, but why weren’t you on the original list of nominations? And commiserations to all who didn’t make the final cut.

Ah, awards. Can’t please everyone.

Have you read it yet? No? Really, you must.

Here’s our Trailer Tuesday feature from a few weeks ago. Add the Booktrust to the list of awards. As The Guardian says, Gaiman is now buried under awards.

And while we are on things Gaiman, here’s two-for-the price-of one, with Terry Pratchett thrown in for good measure. Alas the free audio download is not for us down under, but the interviews with the voices behind the Gaiman / Pratchett audio readings give us a different perspective on their work.

Our other posts about this award, including links to other 2009 acceptance speeches, can be found here.

(Or, to put into context – Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels was a Printz Honor Book at the ALA Awards. Here is her acceptance speech. We seem to have been waiting forever to see it, even though we have been able to read it for a while.)

The lists are long, and keen readers will want to devour as much as they can get their hands on from the Carnegie list, Those who love illustration will savour the titles in the Greenaway list.

Eagle-eyed Judith Ridge alerted us to the nomination announcements via twitter, where she noted that the beautiful and poignant Harry and Hopper (a Margaret Wild / Freya Blackwood collaboration) was in the running for the Greenaway.

The shadowing site will be up and running soon, and worth keeping an eye on.

Image of Kate Greenaway used under Creative Commons licence.

The award is open to works of fiction written in, or translated into, English and published within a specified period of time, and as usual there are plenty of Australians on the longlist.

Fiction Focus was planning to extrapolate all the Australian nominations, but being a bit slow to tackle this task, we are happy to see that Perry Middlemiss at the Matilda blog has already done the work.

It’s nice to see Kate De Goldi and Ursula Le Guin in this company, too.

Best novel – Margo Lanagan (Tender Morsels) was in a dead heat with Jeffrey Ford for The Shadow Year.

Best artist – yes, you’ve guessed correctly – the inimitable Shaun Tan.

Congratulations to both.

All winners here.