CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Great news. We knew the application had been made but it has now been confirmed that Melbourne has been given the nod by UNESCO to become only the second City of Literature in the world.

Edinburgh received this status in 2004 as part of UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network Program.

It’s wonderful news for the city that had the imagination to develop a Centre for Youth Literature, and it comes just before the start of the Melbourne Writers Festival on Friday.

Jason Steger, from the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club, tells more in today’s Age.

Hop over to the Inside a Dog website to see the titles of the 20 books that have been named on the long list for the Inky Awards.

The ten Australian and ten overseas contenders will be whittled down to 3 of each on 12 September, and the winner of the Golden Inky (Australian) and Silver Inky (overseas) will be announced on 6 November.

All the guidelines are on the web page but voting is restricted to those aged between 12 and 18 and can be done by SMS or email. Readers worldwide are encouraged to participate.

Such a strong long list presents many opportunities for English teachers and Teacher Librarians to promote wide reading.  All are compelling reads so the selection of the short list will not be easy.

The site also has details of a Creative Reading competition and information for teachers and librarians.

This is the second year of the Inkys.

The Centre for Youth Literature’s website, Inside a Dog, is busy and about to get busier. James Roy has been writer in residence for a week now, and his blog is inviting students to comment on a variety of thoughts, including their favourite animal book. James will be around for a little longer on the site, so point your readers in his direction.  While they are there, they could try writing a book review in haiku.

And the 2008 Inky Awards are being launched tomorrow. Now in their second year, these awards are looking for the teenage vote. Last year’s winners will be there -  Simmone Howell (Notes from the Teenage Underground) in person and John Green (Looking for Alaska) via YouTube.

We’ll let you know the lists as soon as they are announced, but you can also subscribe to Read Alert, the blog from CYC to keep informed.

Centre for Youth Literature Professional Learning, Part 2

After Dr Pam Macintyre and Dr Susan La Marca spoke about books for Years 5 and 6, the Fiction Focus team sprang into action to let the 150 participants know about some new titles for Years 7 and 8 that would work well in the classroom as well as for wide reading. Some are so new that there are no Fiction Focus reviews yet, but we will link to our reviews in the Resource Bank when they are available.

We had prepared an extensive list to hand out, and we will put this up on the CMIS website as soon as we can make it happen.

It was a frenzied book promotion session - just like being back in the classroom really. Some of the new titles we spoke about were:

• Trust Me (compiled by Paul Collins, Ford Street Publishing) and Short (compiled by Lili Wilkinson, Black Dog Books) - two anthologies that offer a rich selection of writing styles and text types with myriad classroom uses. Both come with teachers’ notes.
• Verse novels, including Hugging the Rock, Susan Taylor Brown’s moving story about father-daughter relationships, mother loss and mental illness.
• Click, a great multi-author work that weaves a narrative from the contributions of many well-known writers, including David Almond, Roddy Doyle and Eoin Colfer.
• Graphic novels, such as Sophie Masson’s The Secret Army, which has so much to unravel including the 1936 Berlin Olympics, British Nazi sympathisers (the Mitford sisters spring to mind), Norse mythology and mystic mediaeval figures such as Nicholas Flamel.
• A brief look at dystopia with The Declaration and Fearless.
• Libby Gleeson’s new title, Mahtab’s Story, which would complement Parvana very nicely.
• Some historical novels, including the Newbery-award winning Good Masters! Sweet Ladies : Voices from a Medieval Village.
• New picture books including Colin Thompson’s ’shaggy lost dog with a lost leg’ tale, The Big Little Book of Happy Sadness.

The afternoon sessions saw Lili and Mike talk on Books for Years 9 and 10, and we forgot that it was late on a Friday afternoon as Maria Boyd talked so inspiringly about her classroom practice and using texts with boys, including her own first novel, Will.

Throughout the day, there was much talk about responding to texts, but that’s for another blog, another day.

There’s no need to call us Ishmael - we didn’t faint on Friday at Novel Ideas, the fantastic professional learning day organised by the State Library of Victoria’s Centre for Youth Literature. The brief was to talk about new titles for Years 7 and 8, so the suitcases were heavier than usual for the long trip.

Morris Gleitzman started the day by talking about his books and his writing rationale. A first person narrative enables readers to empathise with the main characters; the curve balls keep readers engaged and have them asking questions. And the three essential questions he believes all young readers should be asking in any text are:

• Who is telling us?
• Why are they telling us?
• What does what they are telling us really mean?

In the course of their stories, all of Morris’s characters undergo a process that he believes is a recipe for anyone’s successful life journey:

• When a problem or obstacle confronts them, they know how to find the information they need to look for a solution
• They take responsibility for the tasks, challenges and problems in their lives
• They know what questions to ask and to question everything they are told
• They are creative thinkers
• They know what moral choices to make, but these are not always clear-cut, and they understand that the choices they make could have negative consequences for others

Morris started the day with a thought-provoking talk that offered a useful context for looking at any of his books. His latest title Then, due to be published soon, is a sequel to the tough Holocaust story, Once.

More about Novel Ideas soon.