BOOK NEWS: Book Week, the CBCA winners, the Ned Kelly Award finalists & more!

Happy Tuesday everyone!

Normally I’d never put the words “happy” and “Tuesday” in the same sentence, but it’s Book Week in Australia this week and there’s lots of other exciting things happening in the book world.

Let’s get right into it, shall we?

Book Week is finally here!

Book Week is Australia’s biggest celebration of children’s literature, bringing school kids, teachers, librarians, booksellers, authors, and illustrators together to celebrate reading. There will be bookish fancy dress parades, amazing displays, and all kinds of fun events happening in schools and libraries across Australia.

(Plus, we’ll have our own little surprise launching tomorrow… watch this space!)

The theme for 2019 is ‘Reading is my Secret Power’, so if you’re looking for some Book Week reading inspiration then why not check out the winners of the 2019 CBCA Book of the Year awards below?

Find out more about Book Week here!

The CBCA Books of the Year

The winners of Australia’s most prestigious literary prize for children’s literature were unveiled last Friday at a ceremony presided over by the Children’s Book Council of Australia, as well as a bunch of Aussie authors, readers, booksellers, and teachers.

The CBCA Book of the Year is presented in six categories: Older Readers, Younger Readers, Early Childhood, Picture Books, Eve Pownall Award and CBCA Award for New Illustrator, with the winners including Shaun Tan (Cicada), Emily Rodda (His Name was Walter), and Alison Lester (Tricky’s Bad Day).

See the full list of winners here!

The Ned Kelly Awards shortlist

The Australian Crime Writers Association has announced the finalists for the 2019 Ned Kelly Awards! There are three award categories (Best Crime, Best First Fiction, and Best True Crime), with plenty of heavy hitters in the running this year.

Jane Harper (The Lost Man), Michael Robotham (The Other Wife), and Candice Fox (Gone by Midnight) are all up for Best Crime Novel, while Dervla McTiernan (The Ruin) and last year’s Vogel Prize winner Emily O’Grady (The Yellow House) are both up for Best First Fiction. Best True Crime also has some interesting contenders this year, with Chloe Hooper (The Arsonist) and Bri Lee (Eggshell Skull) both nominated.

The winners will be announced on Friday 6 September at the BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival – check out the full shortlists here!

Barack Obama’s summer reading list

Looking for some good reading suggestions? You might want to check out the summer reading list of former U.S. president Barack Obama.

It’s a marvellous looking list, if I do say so myself. Obama encourages people to start with the “transcendent” works of Toni Morrison (who recently passed away), before moving on to new books by Colson Whitehead, Téa Obreht, and more.

Here’s the full list:

• The collected works of Toni Morrison
• The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
• American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson
• The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
• Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
• Inland by Téa Obreht
• How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu
• Maid by Stephanie Land

Other interesting tidbits…

• The 2019 Hugo Award winners (a prestigious prize for science fiction) were revealed yesterday in Dublin, Ireland – see all the bookish winners here!
• Lee Child is rumoured to have been invited to join the Booker Prize judging panel for 2020, according to author Andy Martin. The Booker Prize has declined to comment on the news, so it looks as if we’ll just have to wait for the official announcement on October 14th…
• Melbourne Writers Festival will be here before you know it! From 30 August to 8 September, you can see authors such as Melissa Lucashenko, Tayari Jones, Tony Birch, and Nina Kenwood speaking to the festival’s 2019 theme, ‘When We Talk About Love’. It looks amazing – check out all the events here!
• Aussie author Robbie Arnott’s novel Flames has been shortlisted for the Guardian‘s 2019 Not the Booker prize for its experimentation with “different narrative forms.” Congratulations Robbie!

Thanks for reading – have a great week! If anybody needs me, I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and obsessing over that gorgeous Little Women trailer…

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About the Contributor

Olivia Fricot

Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.

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