Mike Shuttleworth
Mike Shuttleworth is the convenor for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for Children’s and Young Adult sections. He was director of the Melbourne Writers Festival schools program from 2011-2015 and curated the exhibition Look! The art of Australian picture books today, for the State Library of Victoria.
Historian John Nicholson has never written about war or sport – two of the pillars of Australian identity – yet he remains our leading writer of history for young people. I reviewed Songlines and Stone Axes (ABR, April 2007), the first book in a five-volume series of trade, transport, and travel within Australia. The book won the Young People’s History Prize in the 2007 New South Wales Premi ... (read more)
Publishing non-fiction books for young adults and children demands creativity, invention and a dash of bloody-mindedness. Our relatively small population means that non-fiction books must make their way in an ever-tightening market. Big-budget ‘wow factor’ titles like the design-heavy Pick Me Up (Dorling Kindersley) and the best-selling The Dangerous Book for Boys (Conn and Hal Iggulden) are l ... (read more)
While Becoming Kirrali Lewis is being marketed as a Young Adult novel, this big-hearted Australian story could fruit-fully be read in many other ways. Playwright Jane Harrison's début novel about a young indigenous woman's political and personal awakening could be labelled as historical fiction, indigenous writing, or even political fiction. Maureen McCarthy's recent novels The Convent (2012) and ... (read more)
Publishers Hardie Grant Egmont established The Ampersand Project in 2011 as a platform for new writing. Erin Gough’s suburban drama/comedy The Flywheel ($19.95 pb, 306 pp, 9781742978178) is the second book to appear under the Ampersand banner. It is a contemporary slice-of-life tale painted with broad comedic strokes. Set in Sydney’s inner-west, the novel follows three months in the life of se ... (read more)
In the Young Adult novel Slice: Juicy Moments from My Impossible Life, you will meet Darcy Pele Franz Walker, a boy named after famous international footballers, but one who has no interest in the game. There is no death or sex (though Darcy wonders frequently about the latter). Nobody has cancer (though a friend’s father suffers a stroke). There are no divorced parents and no drug-taking (thoug ... (read more)