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Last year, Patrick Ness won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for the second time, for his YA novel A Monster Calls, a heartbreaking story about cancer and loss, told through the metaphor of a yew tree that comes to life outside the bedroom of a boy whose mother is dying.
In his acceptance speech, Ness spoke passionately in defence of teenagers, taking issue with the UK government’s negative treatment and expectations of them.
Though his fans span all ages, and his latest book, The Crane Wife, is for adult readers, he is best known for his books for a young adult audience – especially his worldwide bestselling Chaos Walking trilogy, variously described as a dystopian love story with the atmosphere of a Western and ‘one of the most interesting fantasies ever published’. Ness won his first Carnegie Medal for The Knife of Letting Go, the first in the Chaos Walking series.
Patrick Ness giving his 2012 Carnegie Medal acceptance speech.
‘The worst thing our current government, and we as a culture, do about teenagers, in my view, is to only discuss them in negative terms – by what they can’t do,’ Ness told the Carnegie audience. ‘What they aren’t achieving, how much they don’t read.’
‘All it takes is to bother to meet a teenager or three and you’ll see that they’re the same interesting, curious, sensitive, smart, compassionate, funny, questioning, brilliant people they’ve always been – and yet we only ever hear about them in negative terms.’
‘I couldn’t have felt more different if I’d had a tail’
He went on to reflect on his own teenage years, and that universal feeling (which always seems utterly unique at the time) of feeling like you don’t fit, that you stand out in the wrong ways.
‘I was a typically atypical teenager – and I think that’s the secret of being a teenager, that there’s no such thing as a typical teenager. Even the popular kids feel different from everyone else. It’s the standard principle of a teenager to feel alone. And I was the gay, preppy, deeply anxious son of American fundamentalist Christians. I couldn’t have felt more different if I’d had a tail.’
‘I felt like nobody understood what I was going through. And I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way, but I literally had no evidence that anyone understood.’
‘I think to be a teenager is to yearn. I yearned for someone to tell me that I was going to be alright.’
‘I’m really writing for the teenage me’
It’s clear that this longing to be understood plays into the books Ness writes for his teenage readers. He outlined his aim to make sure each teenage character is ‘a complex creation who doesn’t always get things right but importantly, doesn’t always get things wrong’. He now receives letters from kids who, for many different reasons, are grateful to have discovered his books.
‘I’ve always said that I don’t write book for other people – that’s always a disaster. I only write them for myself, because paradoxically, that’s the only time people want to read them. So when I write for teenagers and young people, I’m really writing for the teenage me. The me that needed to be taken seriously, at least once in a while.’
Simmone Howell spent her teen years writing love odes to eighties pop stars and English essays for her friends. Her novel Notes from the Teenage Underground was awarded the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Young Adult Fiction. Her second novel Everything Beautiful was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Best Writing. Her latest novel, Girl Defective, was released this month.
We spoke to Simmone about her alternative career of being a bookshop person or a hobo, why a person who wishes to write should ‘do some livin’ as well', and the fabulous lies she’d hear over dinner with Dill from To Kill a Mockingbird.
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
The first poem I had published was co-written with my friend. We were 13. It was a (rhyming) poem, an ode to the drummer of 1980s pop band The Hooters and it was published in their International newsletter!
What’s the worst part of your job?
The waiting and the general anxiety.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
A long ago phone call from my agent. She asked me if I was sitting down and then told me that Notes from the Teenage Underground was being fought over. There were exciting follow-up emails and then champagne. It was a nice, nice time.
What’s the worst advice you’ve received about writing?
People in bookshops love it when you go in and offer to sign your own books. Best advice? Plod on.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?
When I was 34 and had been trying to write ‘professionally’ since I was in my teens, and I finally had a little success, an interviewer asked me if I was worried about ‘peaking too soon’.
If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
I would probably be a librarian or a bookshop person. Or a hobo.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
I think it can help. Sometimes people have raw talent and don’t know how to control it.
Sometimes people don’t know what they should be reading … and how what they read can guide what they write. What I write now is a thousand times better than what I wrote when I was 20.
But I am also of the opinion that if a person wishes to write they should do some livin’ as well… so that there’s something to write about.
My favourite writers were self-taught and would rather bomb a university than attend one.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Keep a notebook. Read everything. Don’t despair.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
I love bookshops (especially second-hand) but sometimes I can’t wait and use Book Depository. I also love my local library.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why?
Argh! These questions are hard. I am wary of meeting my heroes and these include fictional heroes … But maybe Dill from To Kill a Mockingbird because he would tell me all sorts of fabulous lies …
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
It might be Lace by Shirley Conran. I might never get over the idea of three teenage girls at a Swiss finishing school eating eclairs and painting each other’s toenails …
Simmone Howell’s latest book is Girl Defective (Pan Macmillan).
Lili Wilkinson is a reader and writer of young adult literature; she has written five books for teenagers. The most recent is Love Shy (Allen & Unwin). Lili worked at the State Library of Victoria’s Centre for Youth Literature for seven years, where her tasks included creating and managing the Inside a Dog blog.
We talked to her about why it’s nonsense that you need a miserable childhood to be truly creative, the honour of her work being compared to Playing Beatie Bow, and why she’d like to eat dinner with the BFG (no snozzcumbers allowed!)
What was the first piece of writing you had published?
The very first was a very short letter in the Age – I was about seven, I think. It was about the environment. But the first creative piece I had published was a poem in Voiceworks magazine. I was thirteen. You can read it in the Words We Found anthology, but it’s pretty dreadful.
What’s the worst part of your job?
There aren’t many bad parts. Tax time is pretty boring – part of being a writer is also running a small business, which my creative brain struggles with a bit. Also I’ve just finished the final proofread of my upcoming novel. Generally by the time you get to proofing, you’ve read the book so many times that you’re utterly sick of it.
What’s been the most significant moment in your writing career so far?
How to choose! Speaking at the Edinburgh Festival was pretty amazing. And winning the Ena Noel IBBY Award for Scatterheart. Ooh, and Pink being honored in the American Library Association’s Stonewall Prize, which is an award for books about LGBT teens.
What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?
My Year 9 English teacher started her first class by writing the word ‘succinct’ on the whiteboard. That definitely stuck with me. The worst advice I got was from an author who will go unnamed, who said to be truly creative, you have to have had a miserable childhood. What nonsense.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?
I went to a school recently where I kept getting introduced as a poet – surprising as I haven’t written poetry since the aforementioned Voiceworks days. The best surprising thing was a review that compared Scatterheart to Playing Beatie Bow – the greatest honour.
If you weren’t making your living by writing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Either teaching, or back at my old job at the State Library, working with amazing people to bring YA literature to teens, teachers and librarians.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
All of the creative arts are crafts – maybe there is a certain amount of natural talent, but that talent has to be honed and shaped. Nobody writes in isolation, we are all part of a long tradition of storytelling, and to fully participate you have to know what’s come before, and how your work exists in relation to others. Like drawing, learning to play an instrument or dance, you look at how other people have done it, and then you practice until you find your own style.
What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?
Read. As much and as often as possible. Then write. Get really, really good at it. Show it to a trusted friend and learn how to take criticism. Your first draft is not perfect. Ever. And don’t get too hung up on the idea that your first published work will be this amazing novel that speaks directly from your soul. My first book was commissioned – a non-fiction book about Joan of Arc, a topic that I (initially) knew nothing about. Everyone’s path to publication is different, so say ‘yes’ to as many opportunities as you can.
Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?
Both. I do a lot of reading on my iPad, so e-books are bought online. Australian stuff I get from a local bookseller, and then more obscure titles or US books that aren’t available I get online.
If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? And what would you talk about?
The BFG. No snozzcumbers allowed! We’d talk about our dreams.
What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?
Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock. It’s a children’s novel about a girl called Polly who likes to make stuff up – but her imaginings become real in ways she didn’t expect. I read it every year and am always astonished by the depth and complexity of it. The ending means something different to me every time I read it. It’s a good reminder that books for young people don’t have to be compromised or simplified – kids and teens are probably more able to grapple at big ideas than many adults are.
According to tabloid UK publication The Daily Mail, it’s ‘sick-lit’ – ‘a raft of morbid novels, which all too often inadvertently glamorise shocking life-and-death issues’.
The newspaper has targeted a number of YA titles as ‘exploitative’ and ‘mawkish’. John Green’s bestseller The Fault in Our Stars (a Wheeler Centre best book of 2012), about two teens dying of cancer who fall in love, heads the list.
‘Parents should be vigilant if a child is reading a lot of these books,’ says a child psychologist quoted by the paper. ‘The next time your teen is curled up with a book, ask them what it’s about.’
The Times children’s book critic Amanda Craig says that she has been sent 12 of these ‘sick-lit’ books over the past year, but refuses to review them. ‘When you write for children, you have a moral and social responsibility,’ she says. ‘I think there is a cavalier attitude towards this in the publishing industry, especially as children as young as 11 are likely to be reading these books.’
Michelle Pauli, editor of the Guardian’s children’s site (which currently features The Fault in Our Stars as its teen book club pick of the month) has published a passionate riposte.
‘Illness, depression, sexuality – these are all issues that teens are going to bump up against in their lives, whether directly or at one remove, through family members, friends or representations in other media such as TV, films, and the internet. The Daily Mail seems to be suggesting that it is inappropriate for these issues to be looked at in the one place where difficult subjects have traditionally been most sensitively explored for teens: fiction written specifically for them.’
She also points out that writers and publishers of books for teens ‘think long and carefully’ about the impact on their readers – and that the ‘gatekeepers’ (booksellers, book groups, librarians, bookshop buyers) who stand between them provide added insurance.
Children’s publisher Kate Wilson of Nosy Crow says that seriously ill or dying children in books for children are nothing new, citing the death of Beth in Good Wives and two characters in the Harry Potter series as examples. (For a classic Australian example, think Judy in Seven Little Australians.)
In contemporary Australia, too, dark and challenging books for teens are popular with readers and critics alike. The three titles shortlisted for the Victorian Premiers Literary Award for Young Adults last year were Vikki Wakefield’s All I Ever Wanted, about a girl from a family of criminals, living in a depressed neighbourhood, who strives for a ‘normal’ life; Doug MacLeod’s The Shiny Guys, set in a mental institution and told through the eyes of a deeply depressed narrator who believes himself responsible for the abduction and murder of his younger sister; and John Larkin’s The Shadow Girl (the winner), about a homeless girl on the run from an abusive uncle, for whom school is a refuge.
Is it exploitative to publish books about dark or taboo issues for teenage readers – or is literature a safe place to explore such subjects? Are books for teenagers getting darker, or are we simply paying more attention to them as YA literature gains a higher profile (and higher sales)? And why are teen readers drawn to dark material?
There was a suitably festive atmosphere at the Regent Ballroom for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards dinner last night, as writers swapped their standard work wear of tracksuit pants and pyjamas for cocktail frocks and dapper suits.
Premier Ted Baillieu was in a jocular mood, beginning by pointing to the ‘Premier’s 21’ banner on stage and thanking the crowd for attending his 21st birthday, then joking that he would try to match MC Casey Bennetto, who introduces the awards categories in song, with interpretive dance. (For the record, there was no interpretive dance.)
MC Casey Bennetto, front; with left-to-right award winners John Kinsella, Bill Gammage, Graeme Simsion, Lally Katz, John Larkin and Aidan Fennessy, with Premier Ted Baillieu – middle.
In a refreshing display of that non-partisanship, he personally thanked former premier John Cain (who was in attendance, at Baillieu’s table) for starting the awards in 1985, and name-checked him frequently throughout the night.
Baillieu began by mentioning two biannual awards that were given out earlier this year, congratulating Anita Heiss on winning the Prize for Indigenous Writing for Am I Black Enough For You? and Graeme Simsion for winning the Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript.
Baillieu reported that at last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, that number of countries buying rights to The Rosie Project, reached 30. Baillieu said that the Unpublished Manuscript Prize is important because it ‘helps build careers’.
He concluded his introduction by saying that the Victorian Prize for Literature, worth $100,000, was ‘deliberately’ conceived as the richest literary prize in Australia.
‘It’s a statement about the value we place on writers and books in our city.’
Singing MC Casey Bennetto: Inspired Ted Baillieu to consider interpretative dance.
Aidan Fennessy: Thanks, Mum
The first award of the night was the one voted by the Victorian public – the People’s Choice Award. It went to Aidan Fennessy for his intensely personal, deeply political play National Interest.
‘This means my mum has been hard at work on her computer,’ he said.
John Larkin: Inspired by a school visit
One of Casey Bennetto’s best lines was in the first general award category, young adult, where he sang, ‘I don’t understand how the best in the land can have no vampires at all. Don’t they understand how fiction works?’
John Larkin won for his (fang-free) novel The Shadow Girl, and gave a moving speech.
‘This is the second literary prize I’ve won,’ he said. ‘I won one in 1971, the Sydney Morning Herald Young Poets’ Award. That was two dollars. This is better.’
He thanked the Premier for keeping the awards alive ‘when some states have none’ and bemoaned the idea of state coffers being held by ‘faceless accountants’.
John Larkin
Larkin spoke about the inspiration for his book, which tells the story of a homeless girl on the run from an abusive uncle, a girl who loves books and sees school as a refuge. In the novel, the girl meets an author at a school talk, who agrees to tell her story.
In real life, John Larkin did meet a smart, engaged homeless Year Eight girl while doing a school talk. At the end of his visit, he announced her as the student who’d had the most impact on him; the girl threw herself at him and ‘wrapped herself around me like a limpet’, he reported. He asked the teachers what he should do and they told him to just hug her. ‘So, I just hugged her,’ Larkin told the awards crowd, ‘my tears falling on her head’.
Baillieu told Larkin that his daughter is reading his book right now.
Lally Katz: Researched golems
‘Thank you Mr Premier, for saving me from financial devastation,’ said Lally Katz, as she accepted her Award for Drama for her play A Golem Story.
Lally Katz
She acknowledged the writers of the other ‘brilliant’ shortlisted plays – Aidan Fenessy’s [National Interest] and Daniel Keene’s Boxman – as ‘great mentors to me’.
Katz told the story of being approached to write A Golem Story by Michael Kantor and Stephen Armstrong of the Malthouse Theatre, partly because of her half-Jewish heritage.
‘They said, You know what a golem is? And I said, Yeah, it’s that creature from Lord of the Rings. They told me, You’d better go away and do some research.’
Her research was helped by John Safran, who lent her ‘all his books on golems’.
John Kinsella: ‘A poem is an activist thing’
John Kinsella won the Award for Poetry for Armour. He plans to donate part of his prize money to an indigenous community in WA who are confronting a ‘rapacious mining company’.
John Kinsella
‘For me, a poem is an activist thing, and every poem is an act of responsibility,’ he said.
Bill Gammage: ‘Set to change the history of this country’
Ted Baillieu called Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth, winner of the Award for Non-Fiction, ‘A book set to change the history of this country.’
Gammage won over the crowd from the start, with the self-deprecating remark, ‘Well after three very good talkers, it’s fair enough you get a wanker now’.
He said the stars of his book are ‘the people of 1788’.
‘They gave us a great gift in this country they had taken from them. And they still have much to teach us today.’
Bill Gammage
Gammage said that the terrible bushfires of February 2009 – and the waves of bushfires that preceded them (like the Black Friday fires of 1939 and the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983) – did not occur when the original Aboriginal inhabitants were taking care of the land.
‘If Aboriginal people had been in the midst of those fires they couldn’t possibly have survived them. Those fires didn’t occur. They had ways of preventing it.’
He also commented on the original inhabitants’ methods for managing wetlands, salination and ‘so many other things’.
‘I hope this country becomes a better country by being willing to learn from them.’
Gillian Mears: ‘A novel as round and lovely as a showman’s ring’
Introducing the Prize for Fiction, Casey Bennetto sang, ‘They’re all top shelf, you should read them yourself’. Indeed.
Gillian Mears won for Foal’s Bread, her first novel in 16 years. She was unable to attend the ceremony due to her ongoing battle with MS, and so asked two friends, photographer Vincent Long and writer Jessica Huon, to accept the award on her behalf.
Gillian Mears
Huon spoke of Mears’ ‘acute perception and borderless sensuality’ and the way she writes ‘on the edge’. She called her friend ‘a true artist’.
She also shared Mears’ original vision for Foal’s Bread: she expressed ‘a wild hope of writing a novel as round and as lovely as a showman’s ring’.
‘It has been a determination of hers to write this book,’ said Huon.
Victorian Prize for Literature: ‘Life-changing’
Bill Gammage won the final prize for the night – the Victorian Prize for Literature, worth $100,000 – to resounding applause.
He seemed surprised and overwhelmed, but was as quick-witted as when he won the Award for Non-Fiction.
Bill Gammage and Premier Ted Baillieu
‘It’s the third time tonight I’ve shaken your hand,’ he said to Baillieu. ‘Maybe I should enter your electorate.’ Then he paused. ‘I don’t know what to do with this prize. It’s not enough to get into your electorate.’
And now there’s a parody (discovered via Mamamia) that will tickle the fancy of literary types everywhere: The Hipster Games.
In this clever little mock-trailer, heroine Lochness Evergreen volunteers as tribute after her sister’s name is drawn to compete in the ‘semi-annual Hipster Games’.
‘No!’ she cries. ‘She’s not ready! Her clothes aren’t even vegan!’
Let’s just say it involves battles over vinyl records, a talismanic brooch of the Mockingjays, ‘a rad post-punk band from the late seventies’ – and the line, ‘I just really miss brunch, you know’.
If Christian Lander’sStuff White People Like made you giggle (or cringe in semi-recognition), this parody is for you …
Fans and sceptics alike will enjoy this chuckle-worthy breakdown of a typical Murakami novel. there’s cats, classical music, bizarre dream sequences and jazz. It’s all there; the only thing to disagree about is the percentages. Personally, we think 25% cats may be overstating it a bit.
Lolita’s dark heart
Three years ago, architect and blogger John Bertram ran a competition asking designers to come up a better cover for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel that has been often misinterpreted as portraying a teenage sexpot and seducer. ‘We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core,’ says Bertram, who challenged the designers to do justice to its dark complexities. The competition has spawned its own book, with 60 new designs. A Salon article shares a few of them.
Four different cover designs for Lolita. From left to right: Barbara deWilde, Kelly Blair, Alkesander Bak, Jamie Kennan
The Hunger Games
We all know that The Hunger Games is the new Twilight, which was the new Harry Potter. When books strike such a chord with such a broad and populous fan base, they usually says as much about our culture – and the fears, desires, fantasies or questions it’s tapping into – as it does about the book or its author. On the eve of The Hunger Games movie, Salon’s Andrew O'Heihr takes a deeper look.
‘The Hunger Games taps into a vibrant current of pop culture and indeed of Western civilization in general, one that never really runs dry. It’s the idea that our species remains cruel and barbarous at heart, that the strong will always rule the weak by whatever means necessary, and that our collective obsession with sports and games and other forms of manufactured entertainment is a flimsy mask for sadism and voyeurism.’
The Hunger Games movie: the studio ‘eagerly awaits an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars from teens, tweens and young adults all over the globe.’
Still a fast food nation
Ten years after Fast Food Nation was published, Eric Schlosser reflects on what’s changed and what hasn’t. It’s sobering. He reports that the annual revenues of America’s fast-food industry have risen by about 20 per cent since 2001. The annual cost of the nation’s obesity epidemic (‘about $168 billion’) is, alarmingly, the same as the amount Americans spent on fast food in 2011. And in 2008, 143 million pounds of meat (one fourth of it purchased for federal school lunch and nutrition programs) had to be recalled.
On the other hand, there is a significant growth in those who are embracing a new food culture, championed by the likes of Alice Waters and recent Wheeler Centre guest Jamie Oliver, involving farmers' markets, organic food and school gardens. ‘The contrast between the thin, fit, and well-to-do and the illness-ridden, poor and obese has no historical precent,’ writes Schlosser, in a piece published by The Daily Beast.
35 years of Tales
Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is now officially middle-aged: the series celebrates its 35th birthday this year. To mark the occasion, Maupin – whose life was so entwined with his stories that he used Michael Tolliver’s coming-out letter to his parents to come out to his own – has written a gorgeous reflective piece for the Guardian. He was often at odds with his editors over his insistence that ‘gay folks’ were part of the human landscape and deserved equal billing in his chronicle of modern life. ‘One of them even kept an elaborate chart in his office to insure that the homo characters in Tales didn’t suddenly outnumber the hetero ones and thereby undermine the natural order of civilisation.’
Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City started as a newspaper series. ‘There were times when he was barely two days ahead of his readers.’
As 2011 ends and 2012 begins, we’ve invited our resident organisations to consider the year gone by and to share their plans for the year to come.
2011 was another exciting year for Express Media, as we continued to provide support and development opportunities for young people in writing and media.
The year kicked off with the now annual NEWS Conference, which saw student editors from around Australia descend on the Wheeler Centre to learn what it takes to keep a publication ticking all year long.
In early 2011 we also launched two new online publications written by high school aged students, The Under Age and The Signal Express, as well as the inaugural National Young Writers' Month project in June: a month of online and offline activities for young writers around Australia to set and complete their writing goals.
The final year of the Write in Your Face grants program saw 12 recipients provided $50,000 in funding for projects which supported young writers using language innovatively across a range of forms and genres.
Our existing programs continued to shine, with Voiceworks magazine branching out into ebooks as we dipped our toes into the heady waters of digital publishing. Voiceworks also went international in late 2011, with new distribution arrangements taking it into selected South-East Asian countries for the first time.
Buzzcuts entered its 15th year in style, clocking up dozens of event reviews for the Adelaide and Melbourne Fringe Festivals, all written by writers under 25.
Annual competitions Write Across Victoria and the John Marsden Prize once again drew hundreds of entries from across Australia, and again revealed more outstanding work from young writers.
These competition entries were among thousands of submissions from young writers which Express Media received in 2011, a number of which were recognised at the 2011 Express Media Awards Extravaganza in December.
2012 will be another huge year for Express Media, and we look forward to seeing more of what young writers have to offer in the coming year.
This week has been a veritable hotbed of controversy. Here’s our wrap.
Amina Arraf, a lesbian Syrian blogger, was abducted by Syrian authorities during the week, prompting howls of protest around the world – at least until it emerged that she may be the figment of someone’s imagination. If that’s the case, it would be a distasteful distraction from the life-and-death struggle many Syrians are engaged in – even 13-year-old boys.
But many bookish Spaniards have been outraged by a controversy of their own, concerning the historical legacy of General Francisco Franco, the country’s far-right dictator from 1936 to 1975. A new state-subsidised national dictionary of biography has portrayed Franco’s reign as “authoritarian, but not totalitarian”. The Franco entry was penned by Professor Luis Suárez, an 86-year-old medieval historian known to be a Franco apologist.
There seems to be something inherently dark about the human appetite for storytelling – even among children. After all, Jack and Jill might well have gone up the hill, but Jack broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. But when is the darkness too dark? An article in the Wall Street Journal last weekend about the darkness of much young adult fiction has sparked a fascinating debate. Here’s an overview of the reaction.
Even the Smurfs have weighed in with a controversy of their own. They have, according to one French academic, done the impossible and merged Stalinism and Nazism. Antoine Bueno created headlines this week when he labelled the cartoon characters, created by Peyo in 1958, as deeply racist, thus deeply offending all across the world lovers of the blue characters known variously as Schtroumpfs in France, Pitufos in Spain, Torpikek in Hungary, Sumafu in Japan and, in China, lan jing ling.
And finally David Nichols has just published The Bogan Delusion through Affirm Press. In this essay in The Conversation, he asks, do bogans actually exist?
A new online publishing venture is helping aspiring writers, journalists and publishers under the age of 18 learn the ropes on the job. The Under Age is the initiative of The Age and Express Media. It’s staffed by a team of 12 high school students and aims to publish submissions from students across the state. The team will meet at Media House – The Age’s HQ – every fortnight to discuss forthcoming content among themselves and with more experienced professionals. The website, launched this week, publishes a range of content, from hard news through to arts reviews and sports features.
And the books shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards YA Prize are:
Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar
Swerve by Phillip Gwynne
Beatle Meets Destiny by Gabrielle Williams
Phew. I don’t have to keep my mouth shut any more! Except about the winner, of course, but that’s easier somehow. It’s just a cosy little one-book secret, rather than a big rambling three-book secret. I think my secret limit is two books.
Judging this year was a completely different experience to the 2007 VPLA – which makes sense I suppose, given that you have a completely different set of entries for the year, and a completely different set of judges. (Except me. I am not completely different.) One important difference was that we didn’t have to write a judge bio for the website, or provide a photo. Which absolved me from the photo-choosing despair that I encountered last time! I was going to go with this one, in case you’re interested:
Myself and my fellow judges (Pam Macintyre from Viewpoint Magazine and Leesa Lambert from The Little Bookroom) used the same judging process as the last time I was a judge – once the entries were received we all squirrelled ourselves away and read like the blazes, and we each created our own personal longlists for our next meeting. We kept our longlists a secret from each other until the meeting, to see if there would be any overlap.
In 2008, when I judged the award with lovely authors Kirsty Murray and Simmone Howell, our initial personal longlists had very little overlap, which I found fascinating. So there was lots of re-reading and re-evaluating done after our initial read-through. Our final shortlist and winner were arrived at through a lot of analysis, a lot of brain-wracking, a few more meetings, and a bit of voting.
I expected pretty much the same turn of events this year – when you give three different people a pile of 75 different books and ask them to pick the best ones, you’d assume you’d get some different answers.
So Pam and I turned up at the Little Bookroom on Longlist Meeting Day with our little piles of novels hidden in our bags.
I produced my longlist first. Then Pam produced hers. Then Leesa pulled out hers.
Each of our 4-book longlists overlapped by at least 3 books. Wow.
“So,” Pam said, “Which one do we think is the winner?”
And we all held up the same book.
Then we kind of got the giggles, because it was so unexpected, and so exciting! We were unanimous before we’d even opened our mouths!
Narrowing down the rest of the shortlist took a bit longer – a bit of re-reading and discussing and voting, but given that we already had a three-book overlap in our longlists it didn’t take too long.
So: a different year, a different set of entries and judges, a completely different judging experience. Last time I was pregnant, this time I have an 18mth old. Both years it has been exciting, confusing, and brain-tearingly full on. So has the judging.
I can’t imagine what will happen if I judge this award again in the future. Probably I’ll just have given birth to triplets, we judges will have a shortlist of twenty books that we CANNOT cut down any further, our heads will explode and someone else will have to judge the award for us.
Oh, and did I forget to tell you this year’s winner? How terribly remiss of me.
This is a crosspost from Anna Ryan-Punch’s Reading Your Favourites. She is a YA/Children’s lit reviewer, poet, alpha-librarian and mother.
Simmone Howell spent her teen years writing love odes to eighties pop stars and English essays for her friends. Her novel Notes from the Teenage Underground was awarded the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Young Adult Fiction. Her second novel Everything Beautiful was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Best Writing. Her latest novel, Girl Defective, was released this month.
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
Lili Wilkinson is a reader and writer of young adult literature; she has written five books for teenagers. The most recent is Love Shy (Allen & Unwin). Lili worked at the State Library of Victoria’s Centre for Youth Literature for seven years, where her tasks included creating and managing the 
There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?
The newspaper has targeted a number of YA titles as ‘exploitative’ and ‘mawkish’. John Green’s bestseller The Fault in Our Stars (
In contemporary Australia, too, dark and challenging books for teens are popular with readers and critics alike. The three titles shortlisted for the 
